Tolu Ogunlesi’s fiction and poetry have appeared in Wasafiri, Transition, WLT, Orbis, Magma, Sable, The London Magazine, Westchester Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, and others. He’s been awarded a Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Prize and a PEN/Studzinski Literary Award; as well as various writing fellowships.
He holds a Master's degree in Creative Writing from the University of East Anglia (UEA), and is the author of a collection of poetry and a novella for young adults.
Between 2016 and 2023 he served as the Special Assistant to President Muhammadu Buhari of Nigeria on Digital and New Media.
Ogunlesi is a two-time winner of the CNN Multichoice African Journalism Award; a Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Fellow (2013); a 2015 New Media Fellow of the U.S. State Department's International Visitor Leadership Programme (IVLP); and a 2022/23 Weatherhead Scholars Program (WSP) Fellow at Harvard University. He was shortlisted for a Miles Morland Writing Scholarship in 2023.