Olayinka Yaqub is a Lagos-based Nigerian writer. His short works of fiction have won the Sandra Whiteley’s Prize for Children’s Literature, the Awele Creative Trust Award, and have also been shortlisted for Sevhage’s K&L Prize for Fiction, the HNM Prize for African Storytelling, amongst others. When he’s not writing or researching creative ways to commit murder (in books, of course), he doubles as a chemical engineering undergrad at the University of Lagos. His debut crime fiction novel featuring two rival detectives on the hunt for a Robin Hood-like serial killer in Lagos was published by Masobe Books in August 2025.
For Black Boy Review, Olamide Ojediran speaks with Olayinka Yaqub about his writing journey, debut novel and many more.
When did writing start for you?
Olayinka Yaqub: Writing, for me, dates back to as far as my earliest memory goes. I cannot think of a time when I was not scribbling a story, a passage, something, anything, in my notebooks, even long before I realized what it means to be a writer. In primary school, some twelve to thirteen years ago, I had a ‘lightbulb idea’ to start tutoring the kids around me—despite being a kid myself—and it was this side adventure that led me to my first form of writing: filling entire notebooks with mathematics exercises, comprehension passages, and stories of my own making featuring anthropomorphized animals, materials that I would then use to teach other kids.
What kind of books did you read growing up and did they shape your writing in any way?
Olayinka Yaqub: Growing up, I didn’t have the luxury of books outside what was being read in school. And so, the books that marked my childhood were the literature texts I read throughout primary and junior secondary schools, books like Ralia, The Sugar Girl, The Only Child, Koku Baboni, and Footsteps in the Dark. Ben Akponine-Samuel and Nani Boi’s books were also something I voraciously devoured in my early teenage years. While these books are significantly different from what I write now, they laid a foundation for my interest in books and storytelling, evoking childlike wonder and deeply rooted affinity for the magic of words on a page. If there’s any way those books have shaped my writing now, it is in the sense that ensuring that reading should be fun and a story should never bore its audience, however simple or ordinary it may be.
Recently, there’s been a rise in contemporary African storytelling. What does storytelling mean to you?
Olayinka Yaqub: Stories, to me, are a way of making sense of the world and experiencing its endless possibilities. The world is vast and limitless, and we frankly will only experience a minute fraction of it. Stories are how we experience so much more than the boundaries of one lifetime allows. You open a book and subject yourself to a life so different from yours yet so vivid it feels you are living this life. That is the power of storytelling. Its ability to connect and transmit beyond physical limitations.
Your debut novel, The Crimson Vigilante, follows the life of a Nigerian Police Officer hunting for justice. What inspired you to write a thriller novel?
Olayinka Yaqub: The Crimson Vigilante is a product of my 2017/2018 obsession with American crime TV shows and FBI series. Shows like Blindspot, Quantico, and Green Arrow were those I religiously watched over the years and they held my interest in a chokehold so much that I knew, right off the bat, that this was the kind of story I wanted to tell: stories that involved super smart detective characters racing against time to find a smarter, more cunning criminal. This also translated to my reading taste when I finally started getting into novels. Authors like Sidney Sheldon, Tess Gerritsen, and David Baldacci dominated my reading list for a long time. At one point, thrillers were all I read. Now, it’d be difficult to be such a huge thriller head who’s also a writer and not write a thriller yourself. Sounds impossible. However, the biggest inspiration for The Crimson Vigilante, I’d say, was Leye Adenle’s Easy Motion Tourist. It was the first Nigerian crime fiction I read and it basically rewired my brain chemistry. It made me see that it was possible to write crime fiction in a Nigerian setting and do it well, something I’d thought was next to impossible having only read crime fiction set overseas before that point in time.
Can you walk us through your writing process?
Olayinka Yaqub: My writing process? A lot of winging it and hoping for the best. I say this because, for the most part I’m a pantser (that is, I go into my books with no concrete plans of what would happen in it other than a vague overall premise) and I also don’t have a fixed writing routine or schedule. There’s a lot of figuring out I have to do on the page as I write since none of it is pre-planned. I also edit as I write—fixing things in the previous chapter before moving on to writing the next. That way, I can make sure my first draft is not an entirely rough draft and I nip some issues right in the bud before they escalate. On the writing schedule front, I try to write as much as I can any place and time I get the chance to do so. Be it in transit to class, on a sidewalk (this has happened), or in Lagos traffic I mostly write on my phone and that helps the ‘anywhere, anytime’ nature of my writing process too.
You’re currently a Chemical Engineering undergraduate at the University of Lagos. How did you balance writing a book with school work?
Olayinka Yaqub: Sacrifice. Approaching writing and school work from a lens of sacrifice has helped me effectively juggle both, because achieving a perfect balance can be quite a difficult task. But when you think of it in terms of sacrifice, that for you to achieve something—anything in life, really—you have to sacrifice some other thing, it becomes easier. Coming to terms with what to sacrifice and to what extent you want to sacrifice it can be a game changer. For instance, I do not do most of my writing during the heat of the semester. Because school work can be quite a lot, I’m willing to sacrifice writing for weeks to focus on my school work without mentally agonizing over both. I could pen down thoughts, passages, paragraphs, but nothing serious. In cases when I have to write during the semester, I also make the conscious decision of relegating my school work/personal study to the background for maybe a couple of days at a time to get the story out of my head without wearing myself out with both. The sacrifice can be many different things. It could be skipping that after-class gisting session with friends to write in the library before the next class, it could be deliberately taking out of your study time to write, it could be premeditatedly not writing at all for certain periods when school work is tasking. It is in these little sacrifices that I’ve found balance, or something akin to it.
Are there any literary names that have greatly influenced your writing?
Olayinka Yaqub: Leye Adenle, whose books were my introduction to Nigerian crime fiction.
You once mentioned that you wrote your entire novel on your phone. Is there any reason for doing so?
Olayinka Yaqub: It was a case of using the option available to me. I was sixteen when I started the novel, fresh out of secondary school, and all I had was my mobile phone. Well, there was always the option of pen and paper. But my days of handwriting were long over. I had already spent the preceding couple of years writing fanfiction on the internet and stories on Wattpad so I was used to writing at length on my phone.
What challenges did you face through the process of writing, editing and publishing your book?
Olayinka Yaqub: I like to describe the writing of The Crimson Vigilante as the honeymoon phase of the entire process. The phase where it was all sunshines and rainbows. I was writing a book I loved and was having so much fun while at it. The querying process, however, was not as smooth. Finding a publisher (or agent) to take on the book was difficult and the rejections rolled in like relentless waves. So far, that has been the major challenge I faced in this journey: finding someone to believe in your work as a new nobody.
Let’s be honest. Getting a book deal at a young age is phenomenal. What piece of advice would you give to a young Nigerian who wants to get published soon?
Olayinka Yaqub: It only takes one ‘yes’ for your dreams to come true but you’re (probably) going to have to wade through a thousand no’s to get to that yes. It’s all part of the process, the (very many) rejections. Talent is important but perseverance is what gets you anywhere in publishing. Never forget that.
What message do you hope readers take away after reading your book?
Olayinka Yaqub: At the heart of it, The Crimson Vigilante is a book about the boomerang effect of broken justice systems. When justice becomes conditional, hinges too much on ‘who is’ and ‘what is’, and is reserved for only a sect of the society, anarchy is bound to occur. I hope, through reading The Crimson Vigilante, readers become more conscious of every day injustices—both on the personal and grand scale level—and the role of accountability.