Abi’s debut novel The Girl with The Louding Voice, which she began writing during her time at Birkbeck, became a New York Times bestseller, was translated into 23 languages and is now read and loved around the world.
Heart-wrenching and inspiring, it follows Adunni, a 14-year-old girl from a poor family in Nigeria, who becomes a housemaid but dreams of getting an education and finding her “louding voice”. Abi’s second novel, And So I Roar, continues the story of Adunni, who must roar in her fight for a brighter future amidst the devastating effects of climate change on the lives of poor rural women.
When approaching a subject for her second novel, Abi knew she wanted to write about the issues that were affecting both girls globally and locally where she grew up in Lagos, Nigeria. She soon realised she couldn’t separate her characters from the climate crisis and knew she had to tell today’s impact of climate change through Adunni’s eyes.
Unfolding over 24 hours, And So I Roar sees Adunni blamed for the death of a young woman which villagers believe has caused a drought. She is taken home to Ikati – land with fast-fading beauty due to illegal deforestation – for a ritual to appease spirits and bring rain back. During this time, Adunni meets other girls accused of resisting genital mutilation and causing the failure of crops.
Abi said: “My duty is to humanise the facts and tell the story. What better story to tell than climate change as it is affecting us right now? But not just that, but how those of us that are away from those rural villages, how we think we are protected, but there’s always a very thin line that runs between us and them.
“Climate bleeds into everything. It’s like my story is an axe and everywhere it hits, it bled climate. I hit child marriage, climate bleeds out. I hit female genital mutilation, climate bleeds out. That’s the way it felt to me and climate became its own character in the novel.”
In May, And So I Roar won the inaugural Climate Fiction Prize, which showcases powerful storytelling that address the climate crisis and brings stories into the wider conversation about environmental issues. So strong was the shortlist that Abi was “so, so shocked” that she had won.
Just as Adunni sees the transformative power of education, Abi too reflects on how Birkbeck was “pivotal” in her own career as an author. As an aspiring writer who wrote blogs and enjoyed a successful readership, she decided to pursue the MA in Creative Writing at Birkbeck in 2016 while working as a project manager to upgrade her skills and gain a qualification.
She said: “Birkbeck was not too far from my office at the time and the evening classes were a really big plus for me. It was also the discipline as well – you get an MA at the end of it – so I thought I’d have nothing to lose.”
During her Birkbeck studies, she wrote about different Nigerian characters but nobody stood out as memorable until she recollected how families, including hers, employed handmaids as “the norm”.
She said: “The feedback was quite consistent – that I knew how to tell a story but my characters fell flat. I didn’t know quite know how to create a memorable character until I had a conversation with my daughter about childhood, chores and child labour and we talked about housemaids.
“That night, everything from childhood came flooding back and I cried. When I tried to reimagine the voices of the girls who worked with us, I couldn’t hear them. It felt like it was a void. That was it for me, I had to write the housemaid’s story. I tried to imagine what she would sound like and just to give her a dream.”
The memory of receiving feedback about Adunni’s story from Emeritus Professor in Creative Writing, Russell Celyn Jones, is one that will always stick with her, Abi says. Russell told her that the story was not only good enough for her upcoming dissertation, but publishable, and so The Girl with the Louding Voice began.
She said: “Whenever I think back to Birkbeck, this is the one memory I come back to, when Russell said it was publishable. It was a defining moment. And the group I had with [Reader in Creative Writing] Julia Bell – the super group we called ourselves – was amazing. We supported each other and we cheered each other on. Everyone was really supportive when I shared my work with them.”
After finishing the book seven months later, Abi submitted it to and won the Bath Novel Awards – the catalyst to her success. She then had the choice of publishers and, once published, the book became an international bestseller, a BBC Radio 4 Book Club read and was shortlisted for multiple awards, including the Desmond Elliott Prize and the Guardian’s Not the Booker Prize.
Now Abi spends her time coaching writers, speaking at events and working to provide scholarships for women and girls in underserved communities in Nigeria through The Louding Voice Foundation, which she established in 2023.
She said: “There’s always another book too. Whether it becomes a third or fourth story of Adunni’s, I don’t know, but writing is what I love to do. I like to keep that time sacred and keep using the time that I have to write. I write to express, to question feelings, frustrations, thoughts and opinions. I do that through my characters. I go in wanting to educate and highlight. In a way, my writing is my louding voice.”
Credit: bbk.ac.uk
