Literary Birthday – 21 March – Oyinkan Braithwaite

Happy Birthday, Oyinkan Braithwaite, born 21 March 1988.

Oyinkan Braithwaite Quotes

1. I have always wanted to be an author. So over the course of my life, the decisions I have made and the things I invested my time in, were focused on realising that dream.
2. Make sure your manuscript is polished – don’t try to send it the moment you have put that full stop, distance yourself, take some time, and then edit. And edit some more.
3. Educate yourself on the industry – you are reading this article, so you have clearly begun, only 99 more articles to go! I am kidding…
4. Query an agent/publisher – educate yourself on how to do this, find the ones who are interested in your genre and style, go to their website and read their guidelines, follow said guidelines.
5. In the meantime, if you also write short stories, enter competitions. It is a good way to get visibility.
6. Write first, worry later. To be honest, I still tell myself this. We are the ones who hold ourselves back, for whatever reason and I often have to wrestle with my insecurities when it comes to writing. (Harrogate Festivals)
7. I like to write lying down, which is terrible for my posture. (Harrogate Festivals)
8. I used to write poetry sort of from a place of frustration or irritation with things that were going on. You know, it allowed the words to be intense and all that. But I think also what writing poetry taught me was brevity and to be deliberate in your choices. And I think that has definitely affected my prose. I’ve never been one to sort of waffle on and on when it comes to writing. (Lithub)
9. Reading has always provided me with an avenue into a world that was more thrilling and more intriguing than my own. (Harrogate Festivals)

Oyinkan Braithwaite is a Nigerian-British crime novelist and writer. She is is a graduate of Creative Writing and Law from Kingston University. She is the author of My Sister, the Serial Killer, which won the 2019 LA Times Award for Best Crime Thriller, the 2019 Morning News Tournament of Books, the 2019 Amazon Publishing Reader’s Award for Best Debut Novel, the 2019 Anthony Award for Best First Novel. It was also shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction 2019, longlisted for the Booker Prize 2019, and longlisted for the 2020 Dublin Literary Award. She is also a screenwriter with two projects in development for television and one for feature film, the latter an adaptation of her first novel. Her new novel is the Cursed Daughters.

Source for screenshot: (author’s website)
Quotes 1-5: https://oyinkanbraithwaite.com/the-journey-to-becoming-a-published-author/

by Amanda Patterson

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