Yewande was born in Barbados. She grew up in Nigeria and moved to South Africa in 1992. Yewande trained as an architect. After completing a Masters degree in Creative Writing, her debut novel Bom Boy was published in 2011 by Modjaji Books and in the US and Canada in 2019 by Catalyst Press. It won the 2012 South African Literary Award for First-Time Published Author, was shortlisted for the 2012 Sunday Times Fiction Prize in South Africa as well as the M-Net Literary Awards 2012.
Yewande was shortlisted for the 2013 Etisalat Prize for Literature and a winner of the Africa Centre’s Artists in Residency Programme in 2014. Her second novel, The Woman Next Door, was shortlisted for the 2017 University of Johannesburg Prize for South African Literature, the Sunday Times Barry Ronge Fiction Prize and the 2018 International DUBLIN Literary Award.
It was longlisted for the 2017 Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction and was finalist in 2018 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award for Fiction. It was published by Chatto & Windus in 2016, and by Picador in the US, Ullstein in Germany and De Geus in Holland in 2017 and by 66th and 2nd in Italy in 2018. It was published by Zoe Editions in France in 2019 and by Munhakdongne Publishing Group in Korean in 2020. Her latest novel, An Unusual Grief, was longlisted for the 2023 Dublin Literary Award and the 2023 Republic of Consciousness Prize. It was shortlisted for the 2023 Sunday Times Fiction Prize in South Africa. It was published by Cassava Republic Press in 2021, by 66th and 2nd in Italy in 2022 and by Akono Verlag in Germany in 2023. Yewande lives in Johannesburg.
Website: https://www.yewandeomotoso.com/
