Lawless is published in the US and UK as News From Home. Her short story collection, Lawless, received the 2009 Noma Award For Publishing in Africa. She is the winner of PEN International's 2004/2005 David TK Wong Prize and in 2006, her debut novel Everything Good Will Come was awarded the inaugural Wole Soyinka Prize for Literature in Africa. Her radio plays have been broadcast by the BBC.

Her short stories have appeared in journals like Los Angeles Review and Mississipi Review and have won prizes from Zoetrope and Red Hen Press. Her father Abdul-Aziz Atta was the Secretary to Federal Government and Head of the Civil Service until his death in 1972, and she was raised by her mother Iyabo Atta.Ī former chartered accountant and CPA, she is a graduate of the creative writing program at Antioch University, Los Angeles. She was educated there, in England and the United States. Sefi Atta was born 1964 in Lagos, Nigeria. Everything Good Will Come evokes the sights and smells of Africa while imparting a wise and universal story of love, friendship, prejudice, survival, politics, and the cost of divided loyalties. Enitan bucks the familial and political systems until she is confronted with the one desire too precious to forfeit in the name of personal freedom: her desire for a child. In the end, Everything Good Will Come is Enitan's story one of a fiercely intelligent, strong young woman coming of age in a culture that still insists on feminine submission. Written in the voice of Enitan, the novel traces this unusual friendship into their adult lives, against the backdrop of tragedy, family strife, and a war-torn Nigeria. Will her mother, who has become deeply religious since the death of Taiwo's brother, allow her friendship with the new girl next door, the brash and beautiful Sheri Bakare? Everything Good Will Come charts the fate of these two African girls, one born of privilege and the other, a lower class 'half-caste' one who is prepared to manipulate the traditional system while the other attempts to defy it. It is 1971, a year after the Biafran War, and Nigeria is under military rule-though the politics of the state matter less than those of her home to Enitan Taiwo, an eleven-year-old girl tired of waiting for school to start. Everything Good Will Come introduces an important new voice in contemporary fiction.

Everything good will come