Sade Adeniran

Sade Adeniran is a Nigerian novelist, whose debut novel, Imagine This, won the 2008 Commonwealth Writers' Prize for Best First Book in Africa. Imagine This was originally self-published by the author. Based in London, she is also a filmmaker.

Biography Sade Adeniran was born in London, England, to Nigerian parents, and at the age of eight was taken back to her father's village in Nigeria,

Adeniran earned degrees in Media and English from Plymouth University and also studied in the United States as an exchange student at the University of Massachusetts.

She was employed as a business change consultant, while also working for five years on her first novel, Imagine This, describing the book's route to publication in the Brunel University newsletter Brunel Link in 2009: "Like most writers who dream of seeing their book in print, I went down the traditional route of sending my manuscript to publishers and agents but the responses were not positive – there didn't seem to be room in the marketplace for a story of a young girl growing up in rural Nigeria. After years of trying to repress my dream of becoming a published author, I finally plucked up the courage to do something. I realised that if I didn't believe in myself, no-one else would."

Told through her diaries, Imagine This chronicles 10 years of the life of Lola, who is sent as a nine-year-old from her home in London to live with relatives in Nigeria. In answer to whether the story is autobiographical, Adeniran says her response is always: "'It is and it isn't'. Some things in the book are based on real incidents. That village was where I grew up, but what happens to the character Lola is not what happened to me."

As a filmmaker, Adeniran is currently developing an adapted version of her novel, which reached the second round of the Sundance Screenwriters' Lab, and won the British Urban Film Festival Award for Best Script Talent. and she is working on others.

She is a contributor to the 2019 anthology New Daughters of Africa, edited by Margaret Busby.