Noo Saro-Wiwa


Noo Saro-Wiwa is a British/Nigerian author, noted for her travel writing.

Education

Noo Saro-Wiwa was born in Port Harcourt, Nigeria, and in 1977 moved with her mother and siblings to England, growing up in Ewell, Surrey. She attended Roedean School, King's College London and Columbia University, New York, and currently lives in London.

Writing

Saro-Wiwa's first book was Looking for Transwonderland: Travels in Nigeria. It was nominated for the Dolman Best Travel Book Award, and was named the Sunday Times Travel Book of the Year in 2012. It was selected as BBC Radio 4's Book of the Week in 2012, and was nominated by the Financial Times as one of the best travel books of 2012. The Guardian newspaper also included it among its 10 Best Contemporary Books on Africa in 2012. It has been translated into French and Italian. In 2016 it won the in Italy.
Saro-Wiwa was awarded the Miles Morland Scholarship for non-fiction writing in 2015.
In 2016, she contributed to the anthology An Unreliable Guide to London, as well as A Country of Refuge, an anthology of writing on asylum seekers. Another of her stories also featured in La Felicità Degli Uomini Semplici, an Italian-language anthology based around football.
She has contributed book reviews, travel, analysis and opinion articles for The Guardian, The Independent, The Financial Times, The Times Literary Supplement, City AM, La Repubblica, Prospect and The New York Times.
She was a judge for the 2018 Jhalak Prize for Book of, the Year by a Writer of Colour.
Condé Nast Traveller magazine named Saro-Wiwa as one of the "" in 2018.
In 2019 she was a Rockefeller Foundation Arts & Literary Arts Fellow at the Bellagio Center, Italy.
She is a contributor to the 2019 anthology New Daughters of Africa, edited by Margaret Busby.

Personal life

Noo Saro-Wiwa is the daughter of the Nigerian poet and environmental activist Ken Saro-Wiwa, and her twin sister is video artist and filmmaker Zina Saro-Wiwa.

Selected articles