Dare Segun Falowo

Dare Segun Falowo is a Nigerian speculative fiction writer whose work blends Yorùbá cosmology, mythology, horror, fantasy, and literary fiction. Falowo is known for stories that explore identity, spirituality, mental health, gender, and the supernatural. Their fiction has appeared in the Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, the Dark Magazine, Baffling Magazine, the Dominion Anthology and other leading speculative fiction publications. Falowo's novella "Convergence in Chorus Architecture" was nominated for the British Science Fiction Association (BSFA) Award, the Nommo Awards, and the Subjective Chaos Kind of Awards (SCKA). Quotes Outside: breathing with the open cosmos and exploring free nature. There, I feel myself belonging to a larger swathe of possible being than I do in the crumbling shelters and social dramas of the cityscape. The machine of modern civilization has isolated humanity from natural spaces and the essential energies they provide to the human body and soul. Inside: a room where my spirit can find meditation and my body, rest. Dare interview response to Where he consider home Safe in sound. Love-enveloped. Ship. Dare interview response to three words or phrases that come to mind when you think of home A symptom of our national disease, not the actual problem. We can’t force or ask those who have the chance to live fuller lives elsewhere to remain in a failed system, in the name of patriotism. The brains are draining towards systems that value and nurture their dreams. Dare's opinion about brain-drain Explicitly. I grew up in Lagos. I’ve written in a mode of survival my entire career (thus far) due to the constraints of space, bending around noise and the tug of basic needs to make stories. I am curious to see the stories I will tell in a less chaotic environment. Dare interview response on how physical location affects his creative output “Mask was an actual Yoruba thing, the mask of Oro, which no woman is supposed to see. So the story starts with a woman, her husband has a forbidden room and she goes in there and sees the mask and the mask kind of curses her, and she gets lost inside her mind, inside these repeating cycles of her witnessing the death of her children and her dying too; it just keeps building, building, building." Dare speaks about his book 'Mask' “The mask is probably a source of power for him. Probably money. It draws a bit from Yoruba movies, because there’s always the Yoruba husband doing something he shouldn’t be doing, sacrificing his children or people to gain power and money. But I didn’t explain what the mask was about, it was just about her, like, what was going on in her mind—that was where the horror story came from." Dare speaks about his book 'Mask' “Well, before I was being published by Wole, I was in a virtual band, a music band that didn’t really exist (alongside Edwin Okolo), called Pass the Salt. We had our blog, and that was where I cut my teeth, in a sense. We didn’t have a publisher or whatever and we just had a blog and we’d write whatever. We’d reference someone on Twitter and in the next breath, reference some archangel and then reference some mythical figure, it was just a mash-up." Dare discusses what he was doing before becoming a published author “A lot of Nigerians are very much like ‘Oh, a dragon can’t come here, or oh, aliens can’t come to Lagos or Nigeria,’ but in my head it’s like if they come you’ll feel dread. They mean just as much to us symbolically as they mean to Europeans. If they’ve become incorporated into our culture I’m pretty sure they come from a very deep place in the psyche, and so they have a use in our fantasy literature." Dare speaks about his book 'Waterwidower!' “Writing those things isn’t fun for me, but it’s kind of therapeutic, I think—a lot of emotions get felt and released and I hope that’s what people who read these things feel, and that through this feeling they get to let go of something. That’s what horror will do, should do, bring to surface the fears and then let them go. I would like to write horror and fantasy and science fiction, predominantly.” Dare speaks about his book 'Waterwidower!' “I don’t think I would cancel dragons because I’m Nigerian or because I’m Yoruba. You also find similarities, like the story of the selkie. There’s a Yoruba story too, we have a selkie goddess—Oya, the deer woman.” Dare speaks about his book 'Waterwidower!' External links Dare Bio Dare Bio 2 Category:Novelists from Nigeria Category:Nigerian writers Category:Short story writers from Nigeria