Lola Shoneyin’s works include three books of poems: So All the Time I Was Sitting on an Egg (1997), Song of a Riverbird (2002) and For the Love of Flight (2010); and three children’s books titled Mayowa and the Masquerades (2010), Do As You are Told, Baji (2019) and Iyaji, the Housegirl (2019). Her debut novel, The Secret Lives of Baba Segi’s Wives was nominated for the Orange Prize for Fiction in 2011 and went on to win the PEN Oakland 2011 Josephine Miles Literary Award and the Ken Saro Wiwa Prose Prize.

Shoneyin is the founder of Book Buzz Foundation—an NGO that is devoted to promoting literacy, creating reading spaces, and organising cultural And Arts-focused events such as the Ake Arts & Book Festival, and the Kaduna Book & Arts Festival which takes place in Northern Nigeria.

In 2016, she founded Ouida Books, a Nigerian publishing house. She also runs one of the best-stocked bookstores in Nigeria. Shoneyin is currently working on her second novel, and a series of children’s picture books set in northern Nigeria.