Sade Adeniran’s novel, ‘Imagine This’, being developed into feature film

‘Imagine This’, an award-winning book by Nigerian-British writer Sade Adeniran, is currently being developed into a feature film.

The novel won the 2008 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best First Book (African region) and was shortlisted for the World Book Day ‘Books to Talk About’ award.

According to Adeniran, the script has reached the second round of the Sundance Screenwriters Lab and won the British Urban Film Festival Award for Best Script Talent.

Adeniran said: “Imagine This is a 90-minute animated feature adapted from my award-winning book of the same name.

“It’s a coming-of-age drama which follows the story of Lola Ogunwole, who, along with her brother, is taken back home to Nigeria after growing up in London.

“The overarching themes are displacement, loss of identity and otherness. This project was recently selected for the 2018 Durban Talents Lab.”

Speaking on the influence of filmmakers in pop culture, Adeniran said she has a responsibility to tell her truth as a British-Nigerian.

She said: “I always wanted to be a filmmaker but didn’t dare to follow my dreams, so, instead, I got myself a corporate job as a consultant and worked on my creative projects as a hobby.

“After I published my debut novel to critical success, I decided to pursue filmmaking as a career. It’s been a slow process, but as they say, Rome wasn’t built in a day.”

She was born in London to Nigerian parents, and at the age of eight was taken back to her father’s village in Nigeria, living with her grandmother in Idogun, Ondo state, before returning to the UK.

When she could not find a publisher in 2008, she decided to self-publish and in order to sell the 1100 copies she had printed, created a marketing campaign that led the book to critical acclaim.