Lola Olufemi

Lola Olufemi (/ɒluˈfɛmi/; born 1996) is a British writer.^[1][2][3] She is an organiser with the London Feminist Library,^[4] and her writing has been published in many national and international magazines and newspapers. She co-edited A FLY Girl's Guide to University: Being a Woman of Colour at Cambridge and Other Institutions of Power and Elitism in 2019, and her book Feminism Interrupted was published by Pluto Press in 2020.^[5]

Early life and education[]

Olufemi was born and grew up in London, their family home in Edmonton. She attended Enfield County School^[3] and studied English at Selwyn College, Cambridge^[6] She was the Women's Officer for Cambridge University Students' Union,^[7] and one of the facilitator's of FLY, the university's network for women and non-binary people of colour.^[8][9]

She is currently researching for a PhD, with a TECHNE AHRC Collaborative Doctoral Studentship with the University of Westminster and Stuart Hall Foundation.^[10][11]

Work[]

Writing and speaking[]

Olufemi has written and spoken on a range of topics including: art and culture;^[12][13] feminism, gender and sexism (including the Women's Strike and Time's Up movements);^[14][15][16] food equality;^[17] climate justice and race;^[18] race and racism, including archives of radical Black British activism;^[19] and higher education issues, including institutional justice and sexual harassment in universities,^[20][21] and decolonising practices in higher education^[22][23] (for which she was targeted with a "vicious and misleading"^[24] sexist and racist harassment by British right-wing press).^[25][8][26]

Poet Jay Bernard interviewed Olufemi for Housmans Bookshop, and the pair discussed the "internationalist ethos of black feminist movements in the 70s and 80s", connecting feminist struggles such as protests against sexual violence with opposition to settler colonialism.^[27]

Che Gossett, Lola Olufemi and Sarah Shin organised a month-long programme of talks and events under the title ‘Revolution is not a one-time event’ in summer 2020. The launch event, hosted by Silver Press on 9 June 2020 took the form of a fundraiser for Black liberation. The fundraiser was hosted by Akwugo Emejulu and featured Che Gossett, Helena Rubinstein, Ru Kaur, Lola Olufemi and Amrit Wilson in conversation.^[28]

Art[]

Olufemi is a member of "bare minimum", an interdisciplinary, anti-work arts collective.^[1] She has been commissioned by Tate Modern to run a feminist workshop as part of a Feminist Library event.^[29]

Influences[]

Olufemi cites several key feminist, trans-inclusive,^[30][27] and Black feminist thinkers and collectives that have influenced her, in interviews and her writing, including: Angela Davis, Ann Oakley, Assata Shakur, Audre Lorde, the Brixton Black Women’s Group, the British Black Panthers, Claudia Jones, the Combahee River Collective, Gail Lewis, the Grunwick Strikers, Judith Butler, Kate Millett, Liz Obi, Olive Morris, OWAAD, Saidya Hartman,^[31][32] Stella Dadzie, Shulamith Firestone, Silvia Federici, Selma James, the Young Lords, and Sylvia Wynter.^[2][5][33]

Bibliography[]

• A FLY Girl's Guide to University: Being a Woman of Colour at Cambridge and Other Institutions of Power and Elitism (Verve Poetry Press, 2019), edited by Lola Olufemi, Odelia Younge, Waithera Sebatindira, Suhaiymah Manzoor-Khan.^[34]
• Feminism Interrupted (Pluto Press, 2020).
• Red, shortlisted for the 2020 Queen Mary Wasafiri New Writing Prize in the Fiction category.^[35]

References[]