April Ifunanya C. Izundu is a Nigerian author, publisher, digital creator, and literary entrepreneur based in Lagos, Nigeria. She is the author of Tales of an Orobo Kibo Kibo, a memoir exploring body image, identity, womanhood, relationships, and the experiences that have shaped her; Love, Lust & Shege, a contemporary novel about modern love, desire, relationships, and the emotional complexities of intimacy; SÓRÒ, My Child, a children’s book; and Protectors and Prey, a feminist poetry collection. Her memoir has also been featured in literary and youth-focused reading programmes, where she has spoken about body image, self-confidence, and storytelling.
April writes with an intentionally candid and conversational voice, often drawing from the realities of contemporary Nigerian womanhood. Her work explores the intersections of identity, sexuality, relationships, body politics, vulnerability, resilience, and self-discovery. Across genres, she is interested in telling stories that are intimate, honest, and recognisably African.
Beyond her individual writing career, April co-founded the Nigerian Independent Authors Community (NIAC), a community created to support Nigerian writers and independent authors navigating the realities of writing, publishing, marketing, distribution, and building sustainable literary careers. Through NIAC, she is committed to creating greater access to publishing opportunities, visibility, resources, and community for emerging Nigerian writers.
April is also involved in publishing and creative entrepreneurship, using her experience as an independent author to advocate for greater ownership and visibility for African writers. Her books are distributed through Nigerian booksellers, including Rovingheights Books.
Haneefah: Beyond what you choose to reveal through your fiction and nonfiction, who is April Ifunanya C. Izundu? What experiences, questions, contradictions or convictions exist beneath the writer we encounter on the page?
April: Beyond what I choose to reveal through my fiction and nonfiction, I think April Ifunanya C. Izundu is someone who is constantly trying to understand herself and the world around her.
I am a woman who has lived through things that have changed the way I see love, womanhood, family, desire, survival and even success. Some of those experiences have made me softer, while others have made me more questioning. I have learned that two things can be true at the same time: I can be strong and still be vulnerable. I can love deeply and still choose myself. I can be ambitious and still be afraid. I can laugh about something and still acknowledge that it hurt me.
I think that contradiction is very much at the centre of my writing.
I am interested in the things women are often expected to keep quiet about, the messy parts of desire, the things we regret, the things we want, the ways we survive relationships, the expectations placed on our bodies, and the complicated ways we understand ourselves. I don’t write because I have everything figured out. Sometimes I write because I am still trying to figure it out.
Outside the page, I am also simply a woman building a life. I am an author, a creative, a businesswoman, a daughter, a friend, and someone who is still becoming. I have very big dreams, sometimes ridiculously big ones, and I am stubborn enough to keep pursuing them even when the process is uncomfortable.
At the core of it, I think April is someone who believes that our stories deserve to be told honestly. Not perfectly. Not always beautifully. Just honestly.
And perhaps that is the biggest thing beneath the writer people encounter on the page: I am still becoming the woman I write about.
Haneefah: You have written across several genres; fiction, memoir, poetry and children’s literature and you are also working on a classical book. What drives this versatility? What keeps pulling you toward different literary forms, and is there something you are constantly searching for in literature that no single genre seems capable of giving you?
April: I don’t think I chose versatility as much as the stories chose it for me.
I have never really been interested in staying inside one box. When I have something to say, I want to find the form that can carry it properly. Sometimes that is fiction because I need to invent a world and allow characters to say and do things that perhaps I cannot say directly. Sometimes it is a memoir because the truth itself is the story. Poetry allows me to be more compressed, more instinctive and sometimes more brutal. Children’s literature gives me the opportunity to speak about serious things in a way that is accessible, imaginative and safe for a child.
So for me, genre is less about identity and more about possibility.
I think I am constantly searching for language that can hold the complexity of being human. There are things that a novel can explore over sixty thousand words that a poem can destroy in six lines. There are things I can confess in memoir that would feel dishonest if I disguised them as fiction. And there are things I can communicate to a child through a story that would be completely ineffective as an adult essay.
Even the classical book I’m working on comes from that same curiosity. I like taking ideas, stories, cultures, histories and forms that have existed before me and asking what they can become in my hands and in my own cultural context.
Ultimately, I think I am searching for freedom in literature. I don’t want to be limited by the expectation that because I wrote one kind of book successfully, I should spend the rest of my life writing only that kind of book.
I want to follow the story wherever it takes me.
And perhaps that is the thread connecting everything I write: whether I’m writing about love, sexuality, womanhood, childhood, memory, culture or survival, I am always trying to understand people a little better and sometimes trying to understand myself along the way.
Haneefah: The Tales of Orobokibo takes us into some of the most vulnerable chapters of your life, body-shaming, marriage, having to pay your own bride price, carrying responsibilities within the marriage, and eventually divorce. What does it mean to turn private pain into public literature? Were you ever afraid that readers would respond with pity rather than empathy, and how did you negotiate the vulnerability of allowing strangers into those parts of your life?
April: Writing Tales of an Orobo Kibo Kibo meant taking experiences that I had once considered deeply private and deciding that they could become more than just things that happened to me. They could become a story, and perhaps even become useful to someone else.
That wasn’t an easy decision. There is a particular kind of vulnerability that comes with writing about your body, your marriage, your finances, your mistakes and the parts of your life that people may already have opinions about. Once you put those things into a book, you no longer control what every reader will do with them. Someone can read your pain with empathy, someone else can judge you, and someone else can reduce an entire chapter of your life to a single sentence.
I was conscious of the possibility of pity, but pity was never what I wanted from the reader. I wasn’t interested in presenting myself as a victim. I wanted to tell the truth about what happened to me while still allowing myself to be a complicated human being who made decisions, got things wrong, took responsibility, survived certain things and eventually chose to leave.
There is also something powerful about naming experiences that are often hidden. Paying my own bride price, carrying responsibilities within my marriage, experiencing body-shaming and eventually going through divorce are not simply isolated events in my life. They opened up larger questions for me about womanhood, marriage, money, cultural expectations and the things women are taught to endure in silence.
I negotiated the vulnerability by reminding myself that the book belonged to me first. I decided what I was willing to tell, what I wasn’t willing to tell, and where I needed to protect other people’s privacy. I didn’t owe the reader every detail simply because I had chosen to be honest.
And strangely, once the book was out, I stopped thinking of those experiences as things that belonged only to me. They became literature.
I think that is one of the beautiful things about memoir: you can take something that once made you feel exposed and give it another life through storytelling. I wasn’t asking readers to feel sorry for me. I was inviting them to sit with me inside the story, laugh where it was funny, wince where it hurt, question things with me, and perhaps recognize something of their own lives in it.
For me, vulnerability became less about exposing myself and more about reclaiming my narrative.
Haneefah: Protectors and Prey is described as containing “everything you could never put into words.” There is something paradoxical about that, using words to express what feels beyond language. Has writing, for you, been a form of survival? Have there been things you were only able to understand, confront or survive because you were able to give them a language?
April: Yes. I think writing has been a form of survival for me, although I don’t always think of it in such a dramatic way while I’m doing it.
Sometimes I write because I don’t know what else to do with a feeling. There are experiences that are difficult to explain when you are inside them. You know that something has changed you, but you don’t yet have the language for what that change is. Writing gives me the opportunity to sit with those things long enough to understand them.
That is part of what Protectors and Prey became for me. The title itself speaks to a tension I have been interested in for a long time: the ways women can occupy different positions of vulnerability and power, sometimes within the same story. There were things I couldn’t say conversationally, things I couldn’t easily explain without becoming defensive or emotional, but I could put them into a poem.
And once something has a name, it becomes easier to look at.
I don’t necessarily believe that writing makes pain disappear. Sometimes it does the opposite; sometimes writing makes you look directly at something you would rather avoid. But there is a difference between suffering something silently and being able to say, “This happened. This affected me. This is what I think about it now.”
That distinction matters to me.
I have also discovered that the things I think are uniquely mine are often the things other people recognize themselves in. A poem can begin as something intensely personal and then become a mirror for someone else. That is one of the reasons I continue to write.
So when I say Protectors and Prey contains everything I could never put into words, I suppose I mean everything I couldn’t say in ordinary conversation. The poems became another kind of language, one that could hold anger, desire, grief, fear, tenderness and contradiction without requiring me to explain every single thing.
Writing has not saved me from everything.
But it has given me somewhere to put the things I survived.
And sometimes, that is its own kind of survival.
Haneefah: Your latest book, Love, Lust & Shege, brings together Good Company, Almost Ordinary, and Something Like Peace. What was the emotional or intellectual question that first gave birth to these stories? What was the hardest truth to write, and what came most naturally?
April: I think the question that first gave birth to these stories was: What happens when we think we are in love, but we don’t actually know what love is?
That question runs through all three stories in Love, Lust & Shege. The characters experience attraction, lust, loneliness, attachment, desire and the need to be wanted, but they don’t always know how to distinguish one feeling from another. Sometimes we call something love simply because we want it to be love.
I was interested in that confusion because I think it explains a lot of the disappointment we experience in relationships. Sometimes we are not grieving the loss of love; we are grieving the loss of what we thought was love. We are grieving the person, the possibility, the fantasy, or the future we imagined.
The hardest truth to write was probably that love is not always what we think it is, and sometimes loving someone doesn’t mean that the relationship should continue. Sometimes two people can genuinely feel something for each other and still be wrong for each other. And sometimes, in hindsight, what we called love was actually something else entirely.
What came most naturally was the messiness of it all. The attraction, the desire, the bad decisions, the overthinking, the longing, the humour and the disappointment. I wanted the characters to feel human rather than perfectly self-aware. They don’t always know what they are doing while they are doing it.
Because I think that is the reality of love: most of us are learning what it means while we’re already in it.
Haneefah: The title places love, lust and “shege” in the same breath. “Shege” can make romantic suffering sound almost humorous, even when the experience itself can be devastating. What does “shege” mean to you in the context of these stories, and what were you trying to say about the thin and sometimes dangerous line between desire, love and suffering?
April: “Shege” is one of those words that can make an entire tragedy sound like a gist between friends.
And I think that is precisely why it works.
To me, shege is the suffering that comes with wanting something badly and discovering that wanting it doesn’t guarantee that you will get it in the form you imagined. It can be heartbreak, disappointment, embarrassment, betrayal, confusion, wasted time or simply realizing that you have been emotionally invested in something that was never what you thought it was.
But there is humour in the Nigerian understanding of shege. We laugh because sometimes if you don’t laugh, you will cry.
I didn’t want Love, Lust & Shege to suggest that romantic suffering is harmless simply because we can joke about it. Some forms of “shege” are genuinely painful and can leave people emotionally damaged. The humour is sometimes a coping mechanism, not evidence that the pain isn’t serious.
For me, the title captures the strange relationship between desire and suffering: we can knowingly walk toward something because the pleasure, possibility or attention feels worth the risk.
Haneefah: Your characters find themselves questioning whether what they feel is actually love, lust, attraction, infatuation, loneliness or simply the desire to be wanted. Why do you think human beings so often mistake being desired for being loved? And when we discover that what we thought was love was something else, what exactly are we grieving, the person, the relationship, or the future we imagined with them?
April: Because being desired can feel like proof that we matter.
There is something intoxicating about knowing that someone wants you. They call, they text, they notice you, they compliment you, they make you feel beautiful or interesting or sexually irresistible. And when you are emotionally hungry, that attention can become very easy to confuse with intimacy.
But desire asks, “Do I want you?”
Love asks much more complicated questions: “Do I see you? Do I respect you? Can I be honest with you? Can I show up for you? Can we build something that is good for both of us?”
Those aren’t necessarily the same thing.
And when we realize that what we thought was love was something else, I don’t think we are only grieving the person. Sometimes we are grieving the version of ourselves that existed inside that relationship. We are grieving the time we invested. We are grieving the possibility. Most painfully, we can be grieving a future that never actually existed except in our imagination.
That kind of grief is strange because you are mourning something you never technically had.
Haneefah: Across the stories, we encounter lies, half-truths, incompatibility, fear and self-sabotage. At what point does heartbreak stop being something that merely happens to us and become something we have, consciously or unconsciously, helped create? And why do you think people sometimes sabotage the very intimacy they desperately desire?
April: I don’t think heartbreak is always our fault, and I am very careful about that distinction. Sometimes people lie to us, betray us, manipulate us or simply leave. We cannot take responsibility for another person’s choices.
But there are relationships where, if we are brutally honest with ourselves, we participated in creating the conditions that eventually hurt us.
We ignored what we knew. We accepted less than we wanted. We refused to communicate. We tested people instead of trusting them. We stayed because we were afraid of being alone. Or we wanted someone so badly that we kept negotiating against our own needs.
And sometimes people sabotage intimacy because intimacy requires vulnerability.
It is one thing to say you want to be loved. It is another thing to allow somebody close enough to discover the parts of you that you are convinced will make them leave.
Some people would rather destroy a relationship themselves than wait for someone else to prove their deepest fear right.
I think that is one of the saddest contradictions in relationships: sometimes the thing we want most — real intimacy — is also the thing that scares us most.
Haneefah: Your characters navigate relationships across Lagos, Abuja and Ghana, within a world increasingly shaped by situationships, talking stages, red flags, ghosting and emotional unavailability. How much of what happens to your characters is personal, and how much is a reflection of the society we have created around love and relationships? In particular, what do you think Nigerian culture teaches men and women about what they should tolerate, desire, hide or sacrifice in the name of love?
April: There is always something personal in my fiction, but that doesn’t mean every character is me and every event happened to me.
Sometimes the personal part is an emotion rather than an experience. I might not have lived a character’s exact story, but I understand jealousy, desire, loneliness, embarrassment, hope, disappointment or the desire to be chosen. Those are the emotional truths I borrow.
At the same time, our environment inevitably enters our stories.
Nigerian relationships don’t exist in a vacuum. We have expectations around marriage, gender, money, family, sex, respectability and what a “good” woman or man should tolerate. There is often pressure to make relationships work because of what leaving might say about you. Women can be encouraged to endure things that men are sometimes praised for doing. Men can be taught that vulnerability is weakness and that emotional responsibility is somehow feminine.
Then we have social media, situationships, talking stages, ghosting, dating apps and the constant performance of romantic happiness online.
So our characters are navigating both their private desires and a society that is constantly telling them what those desires should look like.
I think Nigerian culture can teach us beautiful things about commitment and community, but it can also make people stay in situations long after they have become unhealthy because endurance is sometimes mistaken for love.
And I wanted my characters to exist inside that contradiction.
Haneefah: Some of your readers rooted deeply for Umar and Morenike, while another found Lebechi’s experiences almost painfully relatable. Your characters seem to carry different versions of the ways we seek, misunderstand and sometimes damage love. After writing these people and everything they experience, has your own understanding of love changed? And ultimately, what do you think we owe the people we choose to love and, perhaps more importantly, what do we owe ourselves?
April: Writing these characters definitely made me more interested in the difference between loving someone and knowing how to love them.
I think love is not simply a feeling. Feelings are often the easiest part. What you do with those feelings is where things become complicated.
We owe the people we love honesty. We owe them respect. We owe them the courage to communicate rather than manipulate, and the maturity to admit when we cannot give them what they need. We owe them the truth before we owe them forever.
But we owe ourselves those things too.
We owe ourselves the ability to leave when staying requires us to continuously betray who we are. We owe ourselves boundaries. We owe ourselves honesty about what we actually want rather than what we think we should want. And we owe ourselves the understanding that being loved by someone is not, by itself, a sufficient reason to remain in a relationship.
I don’t think writing Love, Lust & Shege gave me a perfect definition of love. If anything, it made me more suspicious of perfect definitions.
Love can be beautiful and selfish, generous and frightening, healing and destructive. People bring their histories, insecurities, desires and expectations into it.
Maybe what we owe each other is not perfection.
Maybe we owe each other the responsibility of being honest about what we are capable of giving and the freedom to say when it is no longer enough.
Haneefah: Who are the writers that inspire you and why are they your choice of inspiration?
April: When it comes to my contemporary books and the contemporary style I used in Tales of an Orobokibo, I would say Damilare Kuku has been an influence on the kind of contemporary storytelling I admire. There is a certain honesty and familiarity in writing about African stories that resonates with me.
But with Love, Lust & Shege, I wouldn’t say the book was directly inspired by another writer. A lot of the inspiration came from my own experiences, observations, and the things I have encountered or thought about when it comes to love and relationships.
For the classical fiction books I am working on, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie has been a major inspiration for me. More broadly, I find myself drawing a lot of inspiration from African writers because of the way they tell stories that feel deeply relatable while still carrying depth, meaning and cultural context. They don’t always need elaborate thrills or complicated plots to make a story powerful. Sometimes, the strength is simply in how truthfully they portray people and the realities we recognise around us.
Interestingly, I also consider myself one of my biggest inspirations. I genuinely love the way I write. I have developed a style that feels raw, personal and very much like my own voice, and I value that. I also love that I can change my voice depending on the story I am telling. I can write one book in a particular voice and then approach another completely differently. Some people may find that confusing, but I see it as a gift. To me, versatility means being able to inhabit different stories without losing yourself as a writer.
If I ever want to write a traumatic, thrilling book or even a beautiful love story, Adesuwa Nwokedi is one of the writers I naturally look towards. I admire the fact that she writes so much and has built such a body of work. I love her resilience, her consistency, and the fact that she clearly loves writing and continues to do it because of her passion for it. She also has other things she does outside writing, and I find that inspiring because it reminds me that being a writer does not have to mean that writing is the only thing that defines your life. She is definitely one woman I would love to emulate.
I also really admire Rosemary Okafor, particularly because of the way she engages with her readers and relates to them on such a personal level. That is something I aspire to. I know I may never be exactly that kind of author because I sometimes treat my readers like an audience — and sometimes, if I am being honest, like judges — but I genuinely admire writers who are able to build such an intimate relationship with their readers.
Ultimately, I adore African writers. I love the way they tell stories, the depth they bring to ordinary human experiences, and the fact that their work can be both deeply rooted in where they come from and still universally relatable. I draw inspiration from many of them, but I also want to find my own place among them and become the kind of writer whose work inspires someone else someday.
Haneefah: If literature is nonexistent, do you think you would survive life?
April: Honestly, I don’t know if I would survive it.
Literature is one of the few ways I know how to express myself without feeling like I might go mad or constantly be misunderstood. It gives me a little grasp on myself, a little sanity. Through literature, I can take the things I feel, think, fear, or cannot say aloud and give them a form. So, if literature were nonexistent, I honestly think I might go mad.
I also believe that, as human beings, we need literature to survive. Literature can never truly be dead because the need to express ourselves will always exist. Even a thousand or two thousand years from now, I believe people will still need stories, poetry, books, and some form of literature to make sense of themselves and the world around them.
For me, literature is not just entertainment or a form of art. It is a record of human existence. It allows us to preserve experiences, emotions, histories, fears, dreams and the things we sometimes cannot explain any other way.
That is why I consider literature one of the most important forms of art and one of the purest expressions of human existence.
Haneefah: What words of encouragement do you have for people out there?
April: Just be yourself. Be yourself, do your thing, and keep your voice.
It is okay to feel intimidated. It is okay to feel inferior sometimes. It is okay to feel like you are not good enough. We all have those moments. But try as much as possible to remain authentically yourself. And when change is necessary, be open to changing while still making sure you do not lose yourself in the process.
It is okay to want the best out of life. It is okay to dream big, so dream big. You can do it. But when you dream big, match those dreams with resilience. Match them with your actions, your consistency, and your willingness to keep going even when things do not happen immediately.
I believe that when you dream big and remain resilient towards that goal, the universe somehow helps you shape the life you are working towards. So dream big, be yourself, keep going, and do not be afraid to become the person you have always imagined yourself to be.
