ABOUT
OLUCHI EKWEGH, AUTHOR & POET
It was perhaps inevitable that Oluchi Ekwegh’s love of literature would evolve into a life devoted to writing stories shaped by memory, migration, and the quiet complexities of womanhood.
Born in Lagos, Nigeria, her work is deeply rooted in the emotional and physical landscapes of both displacement and belonging, creating imagined worlds enriched by personal and diasporic history.
Her debut poetry collection, I Am Not the Person You Left Behind , reflects this sensibility: a meditation on love, identity, change, and the painfully long distance between who we once were and who life shapes us to be.
Across her work, Oluchi is particularly drawn to the intersection of African mythology, fantasy, and contemporary African literature. She writes in the space between worlds, the ancestral and the modern, the real and the mythic, the weak and the strong.
Following the release of her debut poetry collection, she is set to complete work on a fantasy novel grounded in African myth and tradition, featuring a female protagonist whose wit and keen intuition propel her to reshape her own fate.
Her writing is influenced by authors such as Eva Ibbotson, Sharon Creech, Jacqueline Wilson, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, and Maggie Stiefvater, whose atmospheric storytelling and imagined worlds resonate deeply with her own creative direction.
Oluchi divides her time between Virginia and Georgia, maintaining strong ties to her local community and immediate family as well as her broader cultural roots. When she isn’t writing, she can be found speed-reading novels, exploring cozy coffee shops, and basking in life’s small moments that later find their way into her work.