Yoruba-born Nigerian author and publisher Lola Shoneyin has been elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, one of the world’s most respected literary honours, in recognition of her outstanding contributions to literature.
She was formally inducted during the society’s annual summer gathering in London on July 24, 2026, joining a distinguished body of writers from across the globe. The Royal Society of Literature, founded in 1820, is a learned society whose mission is to “reward literary merit and excite literary talent,” and has a current fellowship of over 800 writers.
Shoneyin is the author of the acclaimed novel, The Secret Lives of Baba Segi’s Wives, which was longlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction and won the PEN Oakland/Josephine Miles Literary Award and the ANA Ken Saro-Wiwa Prose Prize. She is also a poet and the founder of the annual Aké Arts and Book Festival in Lagos, which has become one of Africa’s premier literary events.
She is the founder and director of the Book Buzz Foundation, a non-governmental organisation focused on promoting literacy and the arts, and runs the publishing imprint and bookshop Ouida Books.
The honour places Shoneyin among a prestigious group of past and present fellows that includes Samuel Taylor Coleridge, J. R. R. Tolkien, W. B. Yeats, and Chinua Achebe, as well as contemporary writers like Margaret Atwood and Kazuo Ishiguro.