Dayo Forster Dayo was born in Gambia and now lives in Kenya. She has published a short story in Kwani?, Kenya’s literary magazine, and was one of twelve African writers selected as a participant for the 2006 Caine Prize Writer’s Workshop. The story produced as a result of the ten-day workshop will be published in a Caine Prize anthology in July 2006.

Her family is one of a group of Krio speakers who emigrated from Sierra Leone into the Gambia during colonial times. As a child, their extended family was large, and also included a host of friends of her parents who they called ‘aunt this’ or ‘uncle that’. When she was eighteen, she left home for university. As there were no universities in The Gambia at the time, everyone who aspired to one had to leave to study overseas. She studied statistics and computing at the London School of Economics. She took up writing aged 35, while living in America, essentially to figure out a way of expressing opinions and publishing essays on various topics and stumbled into fiction while attending a writing workshop. The optional assignment was to extend a character in a story someone else had written.She tried it – and was bowled over by the power of virtual reality – the ability to create someone else’s world and be able to view everything through that person’s eyes. And to feel God-like, able to make things happen, yet be sensitive enough to continue to inhabit a character’s skin.

Dayo’s first novel, ‘Reading The Ceiling’ was published by Simon & Schuster (UK) in May 2007, and was widely praised by the British literary press. The novel is essentially about how the interplay of our choices and fate determine how our lives turn out. Through Ayodele’s life, it explores how much of her character (her soul in a way) changes depending on what life metes out to her, and how much of her stays the same, regardless of how she has chosen.It starts on Ayodele’s eighteenth birthday, representing the cusp between her and womanhood, when she tries to make a key decision – who she should choose to sleep with for the first time? She seems coolheaded as she mentally prepares a list of options – the rest of the book, spanning three of her possible lives from 18 to roughly 65 start with the aftermath of each choice.

Ayodele’s relationship with her mother is often prickly, and develops slightly differently in each life, from antagonism as a teenager through to caring as her mother becomes ill. Ayodele’s friendships also vary through the lives, with some characters becoming more important in one life than another – just as we would expect in our own. Different aspects of her personality come to the fore in each life – vulnerability in one, loss and altruism in another, rejection and calculation in a third. Some key events – such as the death of her mother - happen in all lives, but each look at the event swivels the viewpoint slightly, to reflect the altered pathways to that moment from the young Ayodele we meet at the beginning.

All the lives contain some degree of tragedy as well as some hope, and they touch on different aspects of modern African society – sexuality, family, religion, polygamy, cruel governments – but all of these are anchored to the viewpoint of one particular girl, growing up, learning about herself, and making choices.

To learn more about Dayo Forster visit her web site.