The Unbound Book Festival is coming up this weekend, and KBIA has been talking to featured writers in a series we're calling "Unbound Conversations." Find the rest of them here.
Short story writer and novelist Samuel Kọ́láwọlé was born and raised in Ibadan, Nigeria. He pulls from the mythology, ideology and imagery of his home country for much of his writing. These themes can be seen in many of his 30 published works, including his 2024 novel, The Road to the Salt Sea.
The Road to the Salt Sea won the 2025 Whiting Award in Fiction, an award geared toward emerging voices. His upcoming works include Blackland, which will be published in 2027, and a short story collection called The Hyena Boys.
Kọ́láwọlé is an assistant professor in English and African Studies at Penn State University, and he is a faculty member for the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. He is visiting Columbia for the Unbound Book Festival and will appear on the panels Hit the Road and Tales from the Book Tour.
Kọ́láwọlé sat down with Vox reporter Cory Bexten to discuss his authorial journey. Here is an excerpt from their conversation:
Cory Bexten: What got you into writing? And what made you realize that's what you wanted to do for a career?
Samuel Kọ́láwọlé: I started writing very early. As a teenager, I was just — for some reason, I was depressed. And, you know, I had books all around me because my parents were nowhere. My mom was retired as a former professor. My father was a researcher. So we always had books; we grew up with books around us.
So when I was 15, and I was going through these bouts of depression, I would lock myself up in my room for three days without going out. One day I got bored and I started reading. Well, I was a reader before then, but I didn't read as voraciously as I did during that period. And I read for a long time. I read the classics: Charles Dickens, the Brontë sisters, I read a lot of Shakespeare. Then I started reading the Heinemann African Writers Series.
So, I read all those things. Then one day I decided to write. I picked up my pen, and then I wrote. And as I wrote, something remarkable happened to me, which was that, as I wrote, I became less depressed. So it was like an outlet for me, and that was what lifted me out of depression. And I’ve never looked back since.
Bexten: If someone asks about your writing, what would you say?
Kọ́láwọlé: That my writing is very African and very Nigerian. It has always been that I like to write about my people, my continent, my country. And then I also explore the things that I care about, like class disparity, issues of post-colonial concerns, race, gender issues, all those things.
The Road to the Salt Sea is about a character — well, characters — traveling across the Sahara and then across the Mediterranean Sea to Europe. Now, Blackland is set in the future. It’s the opposite. It’s 75 years into the future. Desert climates, catastrophes in Europe, and European refugees are coming to Africa. So that is the premise. I'm not going to say more about that. Yeah, let me leave it at that.
Bexten: What's your favorite part about writing books?
Kọ́láwọlé: I love revision a lot. The revision stage is something I really cherish because that's the first time you kind of collaborate in a way and you are allowing other people to see what you are writing. And, of course, revision means to re-envision, you know? So you have the opportunity to see what you have written from a new perspective, perhaps, or in a new light.
Bexten: Along the lines of your panel, Tales from the Book Tour, what would you say is your favorite thing about book fairs and book festivals?
Kọ́láwọlé: Oh, wow. So many similar things, you know. Buying books and kind of meeting with their authors from different walks of life. You know, I've written different things in different genres, [so] exchanging ideas with people, meeting readers. Any opportunity to meet readers, I always welcome it.
Also, kind of taking in the surroundings because traveling around for [book events] enables me to see new places. For example, I've never been to Columbia. This is going to be my first time going to Columbia, so that'll be great.
I'm excited to meet with authors, to meet with readers, to meet with participants, to share community with them and, you know, hopefully enjoy the weather.
