After years of writing African stories, Fausat Ayinla is now helping children discover and tell stories of their own.
By Bolanle Lawal
How do you tell a story that invites people to think, imagine and get carried away by the world you create?
And what can that story become after the last page is written?
For Nigerian author Fausat Omolara Arilewola, who writes as Fausat Omolara Ayinla, the answers have taken different forms. Her stories have moved beyond the printed page into audiobooks, music and visual art. More recently, storytelling has taken her into rooms with children and young people, where the goal is no longer only to tell stories to them, but to help them discover and create their own.
For Fausat, that journey began with a simple desire: to tell stories that make people care.
She wanted readers to become emotionally invested in her characters, to care about people they had never met, imagine places they had never seen and, perhaps, leave the story with something to think about.
That ambition is evident in the range of stories she has written, from historical fiction rooted in Yoruba history to fantasy inspired by mythology, contemporary stories about family and marriage, and children’s books built around the everyday adventures of a young Nigerian boy.
Bringing history to life
Rather than presenting history as a collection of dates and events, Fausat explored it through the lives, struggles and experiences of the people who lived through it.
Set against the backdrop of the fall of Old Oyo Empire, her book Atinukẹ́ reaches into a turbulent period of Yoruba history to tell a human story of lives disrupted by war, survival and the search for a place to call home.
But Fausat did not stop when she published the book.
She created an original soundtrack for the novel, drawing from the five themes explored in the book to give another expression to its emotional world. Then she commissioned something far less conventional for a book launch: sand art.
The artist created a miniature 19th century Yoruba home from the world of Atinukẹ́, complete with its thatched roof, earthen walls, cooking pots, stools, firewood and figures representing the lead characters. A setting that had existed first in Fausat’s imagination, and then in her readers’, became something physical and tangible.
It was storytelling taking another form.
When mythology becomes a world
If Atinukẹ́ looks into history, ÀTÙPÀ: The Narrative travels in another direction, drawing from Yoruba mythology and African folklore to construct a world of fantasy.
The story is set in the kingdom of Iledu, where dark forces threaten the crown prince and the future of the kingdom. The survival of the prince depends on Àṣàkẹ́, who must travel to Ìgbó Irúnmọlẹ̀ in search of what can break the curse.
But the journey comes with a price.
Saving the prince may require Àṣàkẹ́ to sacrifice her own essence and light. Beneath the fantasy, therefore, is a deeply human question: How much of yourself are you willing to sacrifice to save someone you love?
Fausat later extended the life of the story through an audiobook narrated by Rafiat Akinwande.
The spoken word dimension is significant. In a tradition where stories have long been passed from one generation to another through oral narration, voice becomes more than a method of delivery. It becomes another way of keeping the story alive.
In ÀTÙPÀ, Yoruba mythology is not simply an atmospheric backdrop. It helps shape the world, the dangers facing the characters and the central choices they must make.
Her use of Yoruba history, mythology and culture is not merely decorative. These elements are central to the stories she tells.
Stories about difficult choices
Fausat’s storytelling, however, is not limited to history and mythology.
In Career or Family Ties, she turns to contemporary life, exploring love, marriage, ambition and the expectations placed on Yoruba women when personal aspirations come into conflict with family and society.
This Foolish Heart Did Not Forget, a sequel to Career or Family Ties, continues her exploration of relationships and the emotional consequences of choices made in matters of love and family.
In The One Left Behind, Fausat examines grief and loss through four stories, asking what happens to those who remain after someone or something important has been taken away.
The book recognises that grief does not follow a single pattern and that healing does not look the same for everyone.
Across these stories, the settings and circumstances may differ, but the questions remain human: What do we owe the people we love? What happens when our dreams collide with expectations? And how do we find a way forward after loss?
From bedtime stories to Bobo
Perhaps the most unexpected chapter of Fausat’s writing journey began at home.
Adventures of Bobo and Friends started as bedtime stories for her son. What began as stories created for a child gradually developed into a series centred on Bobo, a six-year-old Nigerian boy whose world is filled with friendship, curiosity, mistakes, learning and everyday adventures.
At the heart of the series is something deceptively simple: a Black Nigerian child is allowed to be a child.
Bobo gets to be curious. He makes mistakes. He plays, discovers, asks questions and tries to solve problems.
He is not presented merely as a child who must learn a lesson. He is a child living, imagining and experiencing the world.
That raises another question for Fausat: what stories might children create if they were given not just stories to read, but the tools and encouragement to become storytellers themselves?
From author to storytelling facilitator
The question eventually became part of a broader approach to storytelling.
The Storytelling Advantage Framework examines how stories shape the way people understand themselves and the world across three areas: communications, fiction and education.
At the centre of the framework is a six-stage process: Read, Think, Discuss, Create, Improve and Publish.
The process explores what can happen after someone reads a story. A story can make someone question an idea, discuss a character’s choices, imagine another possibility and eventually create something of their own.
Through her work with children, that process is used to encourage three outcomes: Confidence, Voice and Community. Children are supported to develop their ideas, become more confident expressing them and recognise that their own experiences and imaginations can become stories worth sharing.
This has added another dimension to Fausat’s work. Alongside creating stories for readers, she is creating opportunities for audiences, particularly children, to become storytellers themselves.
Giving children the opportunity to tell their own stories
In 2026, Fausat began applying the ideas behind the Storytelling Advantage Framework through the Storytelling Advantage Programme.
In Nigeria, she delivered From Idea to Story and From Story to Pitch in collaboration with Lead for Good Africa’s Rooted and Rising programme.
The first session helped young people identify the story behind an idea. For the second, Fausat joined participants virtually during their visit to Oracle’s Lagos office and worked with them on adapting their stories for an audience, creating a strong opening and identifying the message they wanted people to remember.
In September 2026, Fausat brought the programme to children at Leicester Central Library in the United Kingdom through a session titled My First Story.
The session began with a reading of Bobo and the Biscuit Playground. The children listened to the story and discussed what had happened to Bobo and the choices made by the characters.
Then it was their turn.
The children imagined their own characters. They decided where their stories would take place, what might happen and what problems their characters would face.
Using creator sheets, they recorded their ideas and began developing their own original stories.
By the end of the session, the children who had arrived to listen to an author’s story had begun telling stories of their own.
More than preserving culture
For Fausat, storytelling is therefore doing more than preserving cultural memory.
Her use of Yoruba history, mythology, folklore and contemporary experiences creates spaces where readers can encounter familiar cultural references while also engaging with universal questions about love, sacrifice, identity, family, ambition and loss.
That balance is particularly important in children’s storytelling.
A child reading about Bobo does not have to be taught that a Nigerian child can be the centre of an imaginative world. The story simply allows that child to see it.
And when that same child is later encouraged to create a character, choose a setting and develop a problem for the character to solve, the act of storytelling becomes an exercise in confidence and self-expression.
When a story travels beyond the page
Fausat’s journey has taken her from wanting to tell stories that make people care, think and imagine to finding different ways for those stories to live.
A novel can become a soundtrack.
A book launch can become a miniature Yoruba home made from sand.
A fantasy novel can become an audiobook.
A bedtime story can become a children’s series.
And a story read to children can become the beginning of stories created by the children themselves.
The formats may change, but the underlying idea remains the same: a good story invites you in. It gives you someone to care about, something to think about and a world to imagine.
Sometimes, it may even make you want to create a story of your own.
