The Magic of Fantasy
Dr. Sarah Olutola ’03 loves being a serious academic and, by another name, a best-selling young-adult author
By Patricia HluchyPortraits by Duane Cole
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THE IMPRESSIVE LITERARY LIFE of Sarah Olutola ’03—best-selling author and accomplished academic—is, in part, a revenge-of-the-geek tale. As a young girl, she was utterly devoted to TV shows such as Buffy the Vampire Slayer—as well as Japanese entertainments such as the anime series Sailor Moon, manga comic books and graphic novels, and role-
playing games including Final Fantasy, none of which had yet gained mass popularity in the West. “At the time, it was very niche and geeky,” she notes.
“I really loved those stories and wanted to be the young female with superpowers that enabled her to fight evil and save the world. While I was at HSC and, later, attending McMaster University, I was always daydreaming and telling stories in my head. I thought, wouldn’t it be cool if there was magic all around me? And wouldn’t it be cool if my friends and I knew there were vampires and stuff out there, and nobody else knew?”
Sarah attended HSC from Grades 4 through 9, leaving because her father got a job in another community (her two elder brothers, David ’97 and Chris ’00, are graduates). Sarah's passion for writing bloomed at HSC, where she joined the Young Authors Club. “In Grade 5, my teacher actually let me stay indoors instead of going to recess because I really wanted to finish my book,” she recalls. “Every other student would go outside but I was in class, typing on the computer. When I finally did finish my project, I ran into the faculty room to announce that I had done it.”
It has all paid off for Sarah, now the bestselling author of five young-adult fantasy novels, including the best-selling, three-novel Effigies series, about four girls protecting the world from diabolical phantoms, and the first instalment of another three-parter, The Bones of Ruin. The third Effigies book was nominated for a 2019 Canadian Aurora Award, celebrating Canadian science fiction and fantasy. And, marking Black History month in 2019, CBC Books included her in its list of six Canadian authors of Black heritage to watch.
Her series Bones focuses on the mysterious Iris, an African tightrope dancer in Victorian London who cannot die and becomes involved with an English lord, who wants her—because of her immortality—to join his team to compete
in a “Tournament of Freaks” linked to what he believes is the impending end of the world. The second Bones novel, The Song of Wrath, set for release on April 18, will be followed by a third instalment which Sarah is currently working to complete. She publishes her fiction under the pen name Sarah Raughley through the publishing powerhouse Simon & Schuster.
On top of that, Sarah happens to have a PhD and is assistant professor of writing at the Orillia campus of Lakehead University. She divides her time between Orillia and Hamilton.
Born in London, Ontario, she grew up mainly in the Hamilton area. Her parents immigrated to Canada from Nigeria: her late father, Patrick, was a diagnostic radiologist and her mother, Margaret, a nurse. She entered McMaster with a scholarship to study honours biology.
“Because my dad was a doctor,” she says, “there was this idea that I would also be a doctor or maybe do engineering, or STEM. In Nigeria but also in Canada, if you go into those fields people put you on a pedestal. But while I was good at biology, it just wasn’t my passion. I took the MCAT [Medical College Admission Test] a few times but didn’t get into medical school—and felt shame about that. I tried a bunch of other things, including taking the LSAT [Law School Admission Test] a couple of times, and did interviews for entering into pharmacy.
“I had never really asked myself what I wanted to do with my life and how I could make a career out of it,” Sarah recalls. “I had taken a minor in writing and a teacher’s assistant at McMaster told me, ‘You would be really good in English, writing and analyzing literature.’”
So, Sarah took make-up English courses to get her bachelor’s in the subject and went on to complete a master’s and a PhD in English and cultural studies at McMaster, focusing on postcolonialism, critical race theory and African-
“She is able to bring all of her wisdom, intelligence, experience and knowledge of Black history to her novels, and still make them really engaging and really accessible, especially for kids.”
American women’s literature—“all things that made me remember what I loved about writing so much in the first place,” she says.
Her PhD dissertation “looked at the discourse of humanitarianism with respect to African children, and how that circulates in popular culture and in literature. Like, when Angelina Jolie goes to Africa and picks up a baby, how does that relate to earlier colonial discourses of the ‘civilizing era’—Europe is going to civilize the colonies and all of that stuff. And just looking at it through a postcolonial lens.”
While completing her studies, Sarah also wrote fiction. She wrote her first book, Feather Bound, while working on her master’s; it was released in 2014 by a U.K. publisher. That novel was followed by the first instalment in the Effigies series, Fate of Flames, in 2016, which she drafted while completing her PhD.
Another best-selling young-adult genre author, Stratford, Ontario-based E.K. Johnston, has been friends with Sarah for several years. “When I think of her,” she says, “the first thing that comes to mind is how hard she has worked. For her to get a PhD and establish a publishing career on top of that is beyond impressive.
“She is able to bring all of her wisdom, intelligence, experience and knowledge of Black history to her novels, and still make them really engaging and really accessible, especially for kids,” she adds. “Everyone’s like, ‘Oh, it’s just a book for children.’ But you have to be at the top of your game to write for them because they will confront you in small details. They’re very demanding.”
As for Sarah—who conducts both volunteer and paid writing workshops in the community for youth and adults, has written on Black issues and culture for the Washington Post and Teen Vogue and has been a commentator on CBC Radio—she says that she doesn’t consider being an academic and a novelist a “double life.”
She explains: “Yes, I use a pen name for my creative writing, but that’s mostly so that children who are looking for my creative
work can find it easily and not be bogged down with academics. My creative output is actually very closely tied to my academic research, and vice-versa, because a lot of what I care about, in my scholarly work, has inspired me to think about how I can bring that into my fiction.
“You can teach in different ways, right? ” she continues. “For example, you can lecture through your scholarly work, or through your articles for academic journals, but you can also teach through the stories that you tell. So, what I’ve tried to do in my books is to include equity, diversity and inclusion, and to put a Black woman front and centre, because that’s something that I would have liked growing up, when I was writing my geeky stories.”
Lorraine York, a professor of English and cultural studies at McMaster who was one of Sarah’s instructors during her master’s—and then hired her as a research assistant while she was doing her PhD—is struck by “her understanding of how broad an audience she can speak to. And I think that comes out of her commitment as a Black scholar.
“So, she’s a novelist, an academic, a community worker, and all of these things speak to each other—they’re not siloed,” says York. “And it’s not something every academic can do very readily or maybe even wants to do. She places community at the heart of absolutely everything she does.”
Especially when there’s a hint of magic in that community.