Lola Shoneyin Elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature

July 20, 2026

Lola Shoneyin, poet, novelist, publisher, and the force behind Aké Arts and Book Festival, has been elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. She joins a society that, founded in 1820 by King George IV to “reward literary merit and excite literary talent,” now counts about 800 Fellows elected from among the best writers in any genre currently at work.

Shoneyin is best known for her internationally celebrated novel The Secret Lives of Baba Segi’s Wives, published in 2010. She has also published three volumes of poetry and was named on the Hay Festival’s Africa39 list of 39 Sub-Saharan African writers under 40 with the potential to define trends in African literature. She is a recipient of the PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Literary Award and the Ken Saro-Wiwa Prose Prize. In 2017, we named her our African Literary Person of the Year.

But Shoneyin’s significance to African literature has never been reducible to her own books alone. She is the founder and director of the Book Buzz Foundation and runs the annual Aké Arts and Book Festival in Lagos, arguably the most important literary festival on the continent, a gathering that has, over more than a decade, created community, launched careers, and made the case, year after year, that African literary culture deserves a space of its own. She is also the founder of Ouida Books and its accompanying bookstore in Lagos.

At the induction ceremony at The Fable in London, Shoneyin participated in the RSL’s historic tradition by signing the official Roll Book, and chose to use the historic dip pen once owned by George Eliot.

The RSL is a UK charity aimed at advancing literature, with Fellowship regarded as one of the highest honours a writer working in English can receive. In recent years — particularly 2022, 2023, 2024, and 2025 — there has been a marked increase in writers of African descent included on the list. Shoneyin’s election continues that recognition, and extends it to a figure whose work has done as much for the ecosystem of African literature as for the literature itself. Congratulations Shoneyin!