// àlà //
afọpẹ́ fólúwa òjó
— anywhere to enter —
Writer Creative Technologist Lagos · Amsterdam // àlà // Fiction · Code · Cosmology Writer Creative Technologist Lagos · Amsterdam // àlà // Fiction · Code · Cosmology
Lagos · Amsterdam · // àlà //

afọpẹ́
fólúwa
òjó

Writer · Creative Technologist
Engineer-Poet at the interface
of code, fiction & Yoruba cosmology

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// àlà //
ọjọ́
fiction
Fiction Voice Agents Yoruba Cosmology Machine Learning Afrobeats Temporality Pure Escapism React · TypeScript The Archive Fiction Voice Agents Yoruba Cosmology Machine Learning Afrobeats Temporality Pure Escapism React · TypeScript The Archive
The // àlà // Newspaper

Lead Story · Fiction · Iskanchi Magazine

You Came Here To Rest

Shortlisted for the Iskanchi Magazine Prize (2024) — a story about arriving somewhere new, the strange grammar of friendship, and the small surviving acts of a small animal.

To make any friend, be desperate like you're trying to make your first friend in a jungle where they eat small animals and you are a small animal.


Your parents shouldn't have given you a name with so many rises and falls in its character.


See a girl that also wears shorts and even though she gives you the stank eye, smile at her like you're sisters.


Think of your dad.


Find solace in the boys laughing their hearts out, tears streaming from their eyes. They stop to wipe them every few seconds.


When you look up from your phone and you find them looking at you — know they are looking past you, towards the doors that lead outside.

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Recognition & Prizes
Longlisted · Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize (2023)
Shortlisted · Iskanchi Magazine Prize (2024)
Longlisted · Dzanc Prize
Longlisted · Commonwealth Short Story Prize
Pushcart Prize Nomination
"A mountain goat tormented with the paradoxical desire to write herself into a state of silence."
Represented by
Alexa Stark
Writers House, New York

Fiction · 2026 · Lolwe

Come Come, Let's Go Cycling in the Woods

We speed downhill past the wild thorns, go beyond the witbreuksweg into the woods, past the thick bushets and olive groves that constantly seek out each other, grow together. An unreplied 'I love you' floats in the air, gets caught in the mouth of the next sayer.

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Fiction · The Bare Life Review

Homegoing

I only want to see darkness at night and even then, the sky is still blue. She taught me to draw the blinds and crack the windows. Now I only want to see darkness at night.

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Fiction · Necessary Fiction

Thinny Mister Howards

Mister Howards is a man who wants to be another man, and his life is not better off for it. Words, and so language, are fleeting. He is Zen: troubled by nothing and therefore troubling nothing.

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Research · 2026 · Nieuwe Instituut

On the Politics of Music Video Culture

FESTAC '77, where Nigeria presided over the world as center for Black art. Fela, an uncommon composer, invented a genre which Africa and the whole world would come to tout, love, and celebrate.

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2018 · Maputo · Colab NowNow

Vertigo

Creative residency at Maputo Fast Forward Festival, organised by the British Council. Exploring the Nigerian women's question via p5.js, poetry, and media from a Lagos women's reproductive clinic — a generative web piece where photography and code generate each other in the browser.

p5.js Installation British Council Generative Art
Try it →
2024 · Hugging Face

Masquerade Classifier

ResNet18 trained to distinguish Gelede, Egungun, and Agemo masquerades. ~58% accuracy. The seed of a living voice-first archive — part of the // àlà // universe.

ResNet18 PyTorch Gradio
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2020 · Savvy Contemporary, Berlin

An Afrikan Poet Cries at the Wind

Poems scraped from the internet, redistributed one by one at random to subscribers. The archive as decolonial act. Goethe Institut Lagos-Berlin residency.

Archive Distribution Poetry
View project →
Web · Lagos · mílíkì.ng

MÍLÍKÌ

Website for a private members cultural lounge in Victoria Island, Lagos — a meeting point for artists, writers, musicians, and cultural figures connected to the arts, sciences, design, and social justice.

Web Lagos Cultural Institution
Visit site →
Interactive Poetry · Web

Graceland

An interactive poem about conversations with my father, inspired by Grace Paley's "My Father Addresses Me on the Facts of Old Age." Literary fiction rendered as a navigable web experience.

JavaScript Interactive Fiction Web3
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Engineer
Poet
Interface

Afopefoluwa Ojo is a writer and creative technologist working at the intersection of literary fiction, emerging technology, and Yoruba cosmological thought. Her framework // àlà // — from the Yoruba for fabric, vision, divine canvas — is the architecture underneath all of it.

Over ten years of software engineering, primarily frontend React/TypeScript. Fiction represented by Alexa Stark at Writers House, New York. Graduate of the Purple Hibiscus Creative Writing Workshop. Work exhibited at Savvy Contemporary Berlin and ZK/U Berlin. Currently innovating at Adidas Digital Innovation Labs, Amsterdam.

Lagos Amsterdam Pure Escapism Afrobeats Temporality Engineer-Poet Interface Yoruba Cosmology React · TypeScript // àlà //