Diaspora Star | Atinuke : From Nigerian Childhoods to Global Literary Honour

Atinuke’s journey as a Nigerian-born writer in the diaspora reached a defining milestone in 2024 when she won Book of the Year (Children’s Non-Fiction) at the British Book Awards for Brilliant Black British History. The win did not come as a surprise to those familiar with her work; it was the formal recognition of a career built on cultural accuracy, narrative courage, and an unwavering commitment to telling Black and African stories truthfully to young readers.

Born and raised in Nigeria, Atinuke’s worldview was shaped early by contrast and connection. Her father, a Nigerian university professor, and her mother, a white English author and editor, created a home where language, history, and books mattered. She grew up first in Ibadan, surrounded by extended family, and later in Lagos, one of Africa’s most complex megacities. These environments, academic, communal, chaotic, and affectionate, would later define the emotional texture of her writing.

Her life has always straddled borders. At ten, driven by childhood reading and curiosity, she chose to attend boarding school in England. By her teenage years, she was living in the UK while returning to Nigeria during school holidays, developing a dual sense of home that many in the diaspora recognise: belonging fully to two places, yet never exclusively to one.

At university, Atinuke studied English and Commonwealth Literatures, grounding her storytelling instinct in academic depth. Travel followed, as did notebooks filled with ideas and observations. But her creative turning point came through oral storytelling, after being encouraged to tell a Nigerian folktale on a festival stage. What began as a single performance became a vocation. For over twenty years, she has told stories from Africa and the African diaspora to children and adults in schools, theatres, and festivals around the world.

Those performances revealed a persistent problem. Western children often imagined Africa as either a wildlife documentary or a place defined solely by poverty. Atinuke’s literary response was strategic and direct.

Her breakout Anna Hibiscus series introduced a young girl growing up in a modern African megacity inspired by Lagos surrounded by family, noise, love, arguments, and joy. It was Africa without apology or simplification. The series became a global bestseller and a quiet corrective to decades of misrepresentation.

She followed with The No. 1 Car Spotter series, inspired by visits to her father’s village, focusing on a boy from a family poor only in money, not in imagination or intelligence. Then came Too Small Tola, set again in Lagos, this time centring a working-class girl navigating life with determination and wit. Across all three series, Atinuke consistently dismantles the “single story” of Africa, showing wealth and hardship, cities and villages, ambition and community as coexisting realities.

Her love for picture books, which she considers her favourite genre,reflects her precision as a writer. Action, humour, suspense, and emotional payoff delivered in under 500 words is not simplicity; it is discipline. Titles such as Baby Goes to Market have travelled globally, translated into multiple languages and embraced across continents.

Non-fiction has become another powerful extension of her mission. Africa, Amazing Africa is an accessible, factual celebration of the continent, described by Atinuke as a love letter to her fatherland. Brilliant Black British History, the book that earned her the 2024 British Book Award, turns to her motherland. Illustrated by Nigerian-British artist Kingsley Nebechi, the book traces Black presence in Britain from over 300,000 years ago to the present day, covering science, sport, law, literature, and activism. It addresses a glaring absence in mainstream history education and does so with clarity, confidence, and respect for young readers’ intelligence.

Winning at the British Book Awards, often referred to as the Nibbies, placed Atinuke among the most influential literary voices in the UK. More importantly, it validated children’s non-fiction that centres Black history as essential, not optional.

Today, Atinuke lives in Wales, walking wild footpaths and swimming in cold seas, while remaining deeply connected to Nigeria, the setting for almost all of her more than 20 children’s books. Her work exemplifies what diaspora excellence looks like when cultural memory is treated as responsibility, not nostalgia.

Atinuke does not write to explain Africa. She writes to normalise it. Through her stories, African children see themselves reflected with dignity, and children everywhere learn that Africa and Black history has always been complex, modern, and integral to the world.

That is why Atinuke is a true Diaspora Star: not because she left, but because she carried home with her and made it impossible to ignore.