Deborah Falaye

Deborah Falaye is a Nigerian-Canadian author. Raised in Nigeria on Yoruba mythology told to her by her grandmother before her family emigrated to Canada, she spent a decade writing her debut novel, Blood Scion (2022), which follows a teenage Scion—a magic-wielding descendant of the Orisha gods—forcibly conscripted as a child soldier by the colonizing regime that outlawed her people's culture. Inspired partly by the #BringBackOurGirls movement, the novel was a finalist for the 2023 Ignyte Award for Outstanding Young Adult Novel. Falaye's fiction draws directly on West African myth and the history of colonial violence, using a fantasy framework to write about cultural erasure, resistance, and reclaiming an identity built to be stripped away.