Deborah Falaye grew up in Lagos, where evenings often carried the sound of stories, tales of Yoruba gods and spirits told by her grandmother, echoing alongside the books of African and diasporic writers she devoured as a child. Those early influences, at once mythic and deeply human, became the foundation of her own storytelling voice.
At twelve she moved to Canada, a shift that sharpened her awareness of identity, heritage, and belonging. These themes linger at the heart of her writing. In her debut novel, Blood Scion, she brought them to life through Sloane Folashadé, a teenager descended from Orisha gods and forced into a brutal army that mirrors real-world violence. The novel blends Yoruba mythology with the haunting reality of child soldiers, drawing inspiration from both her cultural roots and the tragic news that shaped her adolescence.
Falaye spent nearly a decade shaping Blood Scion, first as a story about magic and ancestry, then as a work braided with grief, survival, and resistance. The book’s release in 2022 introduced readers to a world that is both fantastical and painfully recognizable, a story that confronts colonization and war while celebrating resilience and Black girlhood.
Her upcoming sequel, War Widow, promises to carry readers deeper into this myth-soaked landscape, expanding the questions of power, justice, and identity that define her work. While she is still building her readership, those who discover her stories often speak of their urgency and emotional intensity, qualities that set her apart in the YA fantasy genre.
Now living in Toronto with her husband and their Yorkie, Major, Falaye writes with the same mix of cultural memory and imagination that fueled her as a child in Lagos. Off the page, she has a fondness for reality TV, a grounding counterpoint to the epic struggles she conjures in her fiction.
Deborah Falaye’s novels stand at the crossroads of myth and modernity, where Yoruba gods walk beside contemporary fears, and where the act of telling a story becomes an act of reclaiming history.
