Abi Dare Books in Order

Abi Daré grew up in Lagos, Nigeria, in the kind of middle-class neighborhood where domestic workers were part of everyday life. As a child, she noticed that many girls her age were cleaning, cooking, and missing school while she was in the classroom. That contrast stayed with her, and years later it would become the emotional core of her fiction.

That question never really left her.

Daré moved to the UK for higher education and built her adult life there before publishing her first novel. She studied law at the University of Wolverhampton, earned an MSc in International Project Management from Glasgow Caledonian University, and later completed an MA in Creative Writing at Birkbeck, University of London. She had been writing for years by then, but like many writers, she was doing it around the rest of life, work, study, deadlines, and family.

The turning point came from a very ordinary moment at home. One of her daughters complained about doing chores, and Daré told her that girls the same age in Nigeria often worked as housemaids for other families. The comment opened the door to older memories from Lagos, where Daré had seen how common that arrangement could be, and to new research into the violence and exploitation many girls still faced. From there, Adunni began to take shape.

Daré has said that Adunni's voice arrived suddenly while she was preparing pages for her MA dissertation supervisor. She sat down, heard that first line in Adunni's broken, urgent English, and kept going. What started as coursework became The Girl with the Louding Voice. She drafted the book quickly, revised it over time, and in 2018 the manuscript won the Bath Novel Award for unpublished work. That win helped her find an agent and opened the path to publication.

Then everything got bigger.

When The Girl with the Louding Voice was published in 2020, it found a wide readership and became a New York Times bestseller. Readers responded not just to the story's hard truths, but to Adunni herself, funny, observant, stubborn, scared, and brave all at once. Daré writes about child labor, forced marriage, class, and education, but she does it through characters who feel immediate and human. Even at their darkest, her books keep hold of humor, tenderness, and the belief that speaking up matters.

Her later work keeps pulling on those same threads while widening the frame. And So I Roar returns to Adunni and expands the story to include family secrets, village politics, and the strain environmental change puts on communities already living close to the edge. The novel went on to win the inaugural Climate Fiction Prize in 2025. In You Are Not Going Back, her essay from the anthology Of This Our Country, she turns from fiction to reflection and writes about Nigerian identity, culture, and contradiction.

Across Daré's work, some patterns come up again and again: girls trying to claim a future, the gap between who gets educated and who gets left behind, the pull between village and city, and the way language itself can carry dignity. Nigeria is not just a backdrop in her books. It shapes the humor, the pressure inside families, the danger, the music of the sentences, and the hope.

She now lives in Essex, UK with her husband and two daughters. Alongside her fiction, she teaches, speaks, and supports work connected to girls' education and empowerment, which feels very much in line with the stories she tells.