Born in Lagos, Nigeria, Aiwanose Odafen is an MFA fiction graduate from the Iowa Writer's Workshop where she was a James Patterson Fellow. She is also a recipient of the Jeffrey and Kimberly Chapman Writing Fellowship. She has contributed to published non-fiction works and participated in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Purple Hibiscus Trust Writing Workshop. She was longlisted for the 2020 Commonwealth Writers Short Story Prize.
As a high school student, she was a gold and silver medalist in the National Mathematics Olympiad Competition. She graduated top of her class with a first-class degree in Accounting and is certified with the Association of Chartered Certified Accountants, United Kingdom. She holds an MBA from the Said Business School, University of Oxford.
Prior to becoming a writer, Aiwanose worked as a consultant across industries, most recently, with an investment syndicate supporting startup growth, and in the public health sector with an international NGO, helping to save lives.
Tomorrow I Become a Woman, her first novel, was published by Scribner UK, an imprint of Simon & Schuster UK, in 2022. In April 2024, her second novel We Were Girls Once was published by Scribner UK.