YEW AN DE OMO TO SO, ARCHITECT AND WRITER

What’s your best holiday memory?

At the turn of this millennium, my family and I travelled to Barbados – my place of birth, and where my mother is from – to spend time with aunties, uncles and grandparents. Yewande is an architect who also has a degree in creative writing from UCT. Her 2011 debut novel Bom Boy won the South African Literary Awards’ First-time Published Author prize. Her short stories include “How About The Children” (Kalahari Review) and “Things Are Hard” (anthologised in The Caine Prize For African Writing 2012). Her second novel The Woman Next Door, published in 2016, was shortlisted for the International Dublin Literary Award and longlisted for the Baileys Women’s Prize. Her third novel, An Unusual Grief, is out now. For this issue of VISI, she wrote one of our upfront essays (page 30), which details the mysteries and marvels of Midrand.