Femi Kayode’s Phillip Taiwo crime novels have been heralded as fresh, genre-shaping entries in African literature and crime writing in general. In 2017, he was awarded the UEA Literary Festival Scholarship, which helped to fund his MA in Creative Writing, focusing on crime fiction. Lightseekers won the Little, Brown/UEA Crime Fiction Award. Called a “delight” by The New York Times and “tense and disturbing” by The Guardian, Lightseekers was nominated for the Strand Critics Awards, and was named The Bookseller’s “Book of the Month” in April, as well as Waterstones’ “Thriller of the Month” in July, 2022. Lightseekers has been translated into Czech, Finnish, German, and Italian, and will soon be available in French.

Femi’s second novel Gas Light was published in 2023 to critical acclaim. It was The Sunday Times and The Times’ Crime Book of the month. It was also selected for BBC Radio 2’s Book Club.

Femi grew up in Lagos, Nigeria. He studied Clinical Psychology at the University of Ibadan and has worked in advertising over the last two decades. He was a Packard Fellow in Film and Media at the University of Southern California and a Gates-Packard Fellow in International Health at the University of Washington, Seattle. His writing credits include several award-winning works for the stage and screen.

Femi was one of the featured writers at the inaugural Doek Literary Festival in 2022, where his panel discussions and creative writing workshops were filled with wit and wisdom.

More from and about Femi Kayode: “Femi Kayode On Lightseekers” (The Bookseller) • Meet The Author: Femi Kayode (Suffolk Libraries) • Meet Femi Kayode (UEA Live) • “Changing The Way The Narrative Of How The Western World Sees Nigeria” (The Africa Report)