Some writers imagine worlds, and other writers make you see your own world differently. Tomi Wright sits firmly in the second category.
Her story began at six, in a school creative writing club at St Saviour’s Ikoyi, where she first learnt that words could build people, places and entire emotional lives from nothing but a blank page. That early spark never left. It simply grew with her.
Today, she is a creative writer, poet, artist, amateur photographer, and editor. But titles only tell part of it. What defines her work is how she tells stories that feel close enough to touch.
One of her most talked-about works, Wheelchair Girl in Lagos, first appeared in Genevieve magazine and later moved to ThisDay Style. It wasn’t a typical lifestyle column. It followed a paralysed girl and her carer as they moved through Lagos and other cities, reviewing real places in conversational, almost intimate storytelling. It made accessibility visible in spaces where it is often ignored, without turning it into a lecture.
That same column now lives on as Efena Smiles, her WordPress blog launched in 2020, where she continues to document life with honesty, humour and a quiet kind of courage.
Her books carry that same tone. Wheels of Imagination: Adventures and Verses of Resilience is a blend of stories, essays and poetry that looks closely at accessibility, resilience and everyday human experience. Nothing feels distant or overly polished. It reads like someone telling you the truth as they see it.
Then there is the novel, What if Sasha Storm Lost Her Voice? — a story inspired by reality that explores fame, faith and identity. At its heart are two uncomfortable questions: what happens when you gain everything but lose yourself, and what if the very thing that defines you suddenly disappears?
What makes Tomi’s writing stand out is not complexity. It is clarity. She describes people in a way that makes them feel real, not constructed. Her storytelling leans into detail, but never loses emotional honesty.
Her journey also carries lived experience that shapes her perspective. After a catastrophic injury in 2014, she began using a wheelchair. That moment could have narrowed her world. Instead, it deepened her voice. Her work does not orbit limitation. It centres life as it is lived, with all its texture, contradiction and movement.
She has studied across Lagos and the United Kingdom, from Queen’s College Yaba to Cheltenham Ladies College, University of Bristol and SOAS London, and those layers of place and culture quietly show up in her writing, without ever overwhelming it.
Pride Magazine Nigeria admires how Tomi Wright uses her stories to make you pay attention. And that is what makes her this week’s Woman Crush Wednesday.