Much like myself, Adeyemi struggled with never reading about characters who looked like her in young adult books, especially within fantasy settings, when growing up: “It’s way more common to see a talking animal or a dragon than it is to see a person of colour or another marginalised identity. I’m now realising the detrimental effect that had on me - loving something so intensely when I never saw myself.”

A storyteller from the age of six, Adeyemi had no problem seeing herself in her stories - she wistfully remembers naming the characters of her first ever story Tomi and Toni - and she was writing the adventures that she wanted to have. But, her protagonists were always white or biracial. “Deep down, that’s what I wanted to be because I was taught by society subconsciously that that’s okay, that’s what is accepted,” says Adeyemi. “I had taught myself that I couldn’t be in my own imagination.”

Over the years, Adeyemi began to use her writing privately as a vehicle for her own healing, and unpicking shame and guilt around her blackness. However, this changed for her around 2011 with the racist outrage around the casting for the film adaption of Suzanne Collins’ The Hunger Games. “There was an uproar that a segment of the internet had about Rue and Cinna being black and I hadn’t even processed that. It wasn’t like ‘Oh cool, there’s black people in this, what an exciting story’, it was more ‘kids are dying in this story, how are you focusing on that?’ But not only could people focus on it, they were angered by it. You had people saying that it wasn’t sad when Rue died because she was black.”

“Why Tomi Adeyemi’s writing shows me the magic of being a black woman”