Olukorede Yishau: Portrait of a journalist-writer

By Rebecca Ejifoma

On a humid Lagos afternoon in 1999, a young reporter named Olukorede Yishau sat at a desk in The Source magazine’s newsroom on Emina Crescent off Toyin Street in Ikeja, Lagos, Nigeria’s commercial capital.
At the time, Nigeria had just stumbled out of years of military rule, and the country was restless, confused, half-relieved, half-terrified. For a cub reporter barely out of the Nigerian Institute of Journalism, it was a time to test courage. He filed stories that cut through the fog of the young democracy, stories that made some people uncomfortable.

That reputation has carried him far. Today, Yishau is based in Houston, from where his writings cover everything from the messy theatre of Nigerian politics to the intimate cracks in American society. He has won awards: The Nigeria Media Merit Awards named him Columnist of the Year in 2015, after earlier prizes for aviation and capital markets reporting, but the recognition feels like footnotes beside the larger truth of his career.

Fiction gave him a different freedom. “Fiction allows you to tell truths journalism cannot,” he once remarked, and in his novels and short stories you can hear that conviction echo. His debut, In the Name of Our Father, appeared in 2018, a fearless excavation of the Abacha years. The novel did not shy away from the darkness of authoritarianism or the seductions of false prophets; it was longlisted for the Nigeria Prize for Literature in 2021, a nod to its unflinching gaze. When he followed it with Vaults of Secrets two years later, critics were struck by how pointed the stories felt—ten compact narratives circling corruption, betrayal, and the little compromises that unravel nations. One reviewer described the collection as “a fictional reality,” another praised the “beautifully drawn characters” that exposed “the grotesques of human life.” In one story, a death-row inmate describes her prison as “a house of horror,” while in another, cultism and politics bleed into each other in ways both grotesque and ordinary.

His most recent work has been more intimate. After the End, published in 2024, is a novel of grief, betrayal, and the collapse of illusion. It begins with a jarring sentence: “Google died on the day the UK voted to leave the European Union.” In it, the main character, Demola, nicknamed Google for his air of omniscience, dies suddenly, and his widow, Idera, discovers that the man she thought she knew had a secret family. The revelation is devastating, not only because of the betrayal but because it forces her to see her marriage as a carefully curated illusion. A reviewer in Sankara Africa Review called the book “a meditation on the daily performances we enact to hide our flaws.” Another, Taiwo Oloyede, noted how the geography of the novel, Lagos, Liverpool, London, and Ile-Ife, acted like characters themselves, reflecting or distorting the inner lives of the grieving women. Lagos pulsed with chaotic energy that mirrored Idera’s anguish, while London and Liverpool were cold, indifferent, almost alien.

The dialogue between the women at the heart of the story is unsparing. Lydia, the mistress who arrives with a child, tells the widow she was a grieving woman sick of being in the shadows. It is a line that cracks the novel wide open. The narrative is not about villains and victims but about flawed people making choices, each one paying the price in loneliness, in mental collapse, in fractured families. As one critic put it, there are “no good or bad people in this story, only people who make bad decisions.”

This way of writing, empathetic yet unsparing, runs through all of Yishau’s works. His journalism questions governments and policies; his fiction questions the human cost. In both, the moral inquiry is the same: who benefits, who suffers, and why? “Power is never neutral,” he once said, and whether he is filing a column from Houston about Nigeria’s electoral politics or publishing a novel about a grieving family in Lagos, that conviction pulses through his sentences.

In 2021, the U.S. Mission in Nigeria nominated him for the University of Iowa’s “Telling Our Stories” programme, bringing him into conversation with writers around the African continent who believe in narrative as a form of healing and reckoning. It was an acknowledgment that his work belongs to a transnational literary community, even as it remains rooted in the Nigerian soil that shaped him.

Yet for all the recognition, the prizes, the longlistings, the international nods, Yishau himself is understated. He does not seem interested in cultivating celebrity. Colleagues describe him as a quiet presence, more comfortable behind a keyboard than in the glare of public attention. But the spotlight has found him anyway, not because he chases it, but because his words keep carrying farther than he perhaps expects.
To read him is to enter a reckoning. His stories, whether journalistic or fictional, insist on remembering what others want forgotten. They pry open the carefully sealed rooms where secrets fester, political secrets, religious secrets, family secrets, and they let the air in. “Fiction is the echo of history’s first draft,” he has suggested, and in his books the echo is not faint. It is insistent, reverberating, refusing silence.

From the ‘rickety’ desk in Lagos where he began, to the skyscrapered sprawl of Houston where he now files dispatches, Yishau carried the same conviction: that words, carefully wielded, can illuminate both the headlines of today and the private truths of tomorrow. His keypad refuses silence, and in that refusal he has carved a place among the voices shaping how Nigeria and Nigerians tell their stories to themselves and to the world.