Tope Folarin, the Nigerian-American novelist and 2013 Caine Prize winner, has opened up about the financial realities of his writing life in a new interview with the Substack newsletter How I Make Money Writing.

Folarin reveals that his fiction and cultural criticism earn him around $20,000 a year, while the bulk of his income comes from his two institutional roles — Executive Director of the progressive think tank, the Institute for Policy Studies, and inaugural Lannan Visiting Lecturer in Creative Writing at Georgetown University.

Folarin is the author of A Particular Kind of Black Man (Simon & Schuster, 2019), a semi-autobiographical novel about a child of Nigerian immigrants growing up in Utah who loses his mother to mental illness and spends the rest of the book trying to piece together a fragmented identity. The New York Times Book Review described it as “a study of the particulate self.” Before the novel, he built his reputation through short fiction — his story “Miracle,” about an evangelical Nigerian church in Texas, won the Caine Prize, making him the first writer born and based outside the African continent to receive the award. He was shortlisted again in 2016, named to the Hay Festival’s Africa39 list of the most promising African writers under forty, and won the Whiting Award for Fiction in 2021.

The central argument of the interview is that financial independence from publishing is not a compromise but a strategy. Folarin says that if he relied on writing for most of his income, he would feel pressure to follow commercial trends, and he is frank about what those trends look like for writers like him. “The aperture for viable commercial fiction by Black literary writers is fairly small,” he says. “One is expected to write about a narrow band of historical or contemporary social problems.” His institutional salaries buy him the freedom to ignore that expectation entirely.

One of the more pointed moments in the interview concerns credentials. Folarin holds a Rhodes Scholarship and two master’s degrees from Oxford, the kind of pedigree that, he initially assumed, would carry weight in literary spaces. It did not. When he began sending out stories and query letters, he mentioned his degrees and awards. Nobody seemed to care. The only credential that actually mattered in the literary fiction world, he discovered, was the MFA, a degree he does not have. He describes the literary world as “very insular” and notes that writers without the expected institutional markers are viewed with skepticism, regardless of their other accomplishments.

The full interview, which includes discussion of how his debut was navigated through a publishing process that had effectively orphaned it, is behind a paywall on the How I Make Money Writing Substack. It is one of the more honest accounts of what it actually costs, and what it actually takes, to sustain serious literary ambition as an African writer working today. Read it at howimakemoneywriting.substack.com.