She fell in love with poetry in her UK primary school, returning to Lagos to go to secondary school, then back to London to sit her A-levels and do a law and creative writing degree at the Kingston University.
Was the story inspired by the flood of testimonies that emerged out of the #MeToo movement? No, says Braithwaite, “the idea first came when I read about the black widow spider ”.īorn in Nigeria, Braithwaite shuttled between London and Lagos as she was growing up (her parents are Nigerian-born British citizens) and she now considers both cities to be home in different ways. Its sparky black comedy makes it something of a satire-meets-slasher, but its broader, more serious themes include timely explorations of violence against women and psychotic female rage. The book is a thriller whose plot revolves around two sisters, the younger and more beautiful of whom keeps killing her boyfriends. By last month, it had been translated into nine languages and the film rights sold to Working Title. I wanted to do something fun for myself.”Ī month later, in September 2017, she had completed the first draft for what would become her sensational debut the book sold both at home, in Nigeria, and in Britain and the US, well before she hit her milestone birthday in March last year. “The book was a way back out of my writer’s block. She had not written for a while and conceived the story of My Sister, the Serial Killer – a combination of deadly sexual attraction, psychosis, murder and sibling loyalty – as a way of flexing her writing muscles. “I asked myself: ‘Are you really going to turn 30 never having sent out a novel to an agent? You say you want to achieve this dream but you haven’t even tried!’”
“I was writing in a frenzy,” says Braithwaite, speaking from her home in Lagos, Nigeria. It was now or never, she thought, and she got to work. It wasn’t the prospect of getting older that alarmed her, but that she had still not written a novel and sent it to an agent, as she had been promising herself. Six months before Oyinkan Braithwaite turned 30, she began to panic.
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