About

Ani Kayode Somtochukwu is a scientist, writer, digital creator, and queer liberation activist. His work interrogates themes of queer identity, resistance and liberation, with a focus on African narratives of queerness and it’s varied contestations in the literary and political sphere.

He writes in both English and Igbo and earned a Bachelor’s degree in Applied Biology and Biotechnology from the Enugu State University of Science and Technology in 2019. After the height of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2021, he worked at the Nigerian Institute of Medical Research (NIMR) as a Biomedical Research Assistant until October 2022.

Ani writes fiction, poetry, as well as creative and political non-fiction, and his work has been published in several literary magazines across Africa, Europe, North America and Asia.

His poetry was shortlisted for the 2017 Erbacce Poetry Prize and his short stories have been shortlisted His short stories have been shortlisted for the ALCS Tom-Gallon Trust Award and the Toyin Falola Prize.

His debut novel, And Then He Sang A Lullaby, won the 2021 James Currey Prize for African Literature and is forthcoming from Roxane Gay Books in June, 2023. He is represented by Emma Shercliff at the Laxfield Literary Agency.

Ani has been working as a queer liberation activist since 2015, particularly through digital advocacy, mutual aid organizing, and political organization. His work centers community resilience, decolonization, abolition and socialist transformation.

He has been involved in various campaigns and his work has been featured in several national as well as international press. He is the Central Committee Chair of the Queer Union for Economic and Social Transformation (QUEST9ja), an abolitionist, socialist, anti-imperialist, and pan-Africanist collective of queer Nigerians organizing towards queer liberation. 

Ani’s work as an activist has received wide recognition. In 2020, he was a finalist for the Nigerian Prize for Difference and Diversity and in 2019, he was the recipient of the SOGIESC Rights Activist of the Year Award, presented by the Initiative for Equal Rights (TIERs) as part of the Freedom Awards. For more information on how you can support his work as a social activist, go here.