| Rogba Payne was born in London, England in a vintage millennial year. His adolescence was spent across seven different schools in both Nigeria and England, where he spent much of his time people-watching, dreaming up stories and silently correcting people’s grammar. He went on to study law at University. The people-watching became more of a passion and with all that dreaming, the figures of his first epic trilogy began to take shape. After graduating, he was forcibly encouraged to quit the dreaming and get serious. Thus began a career in law that took him from London to Lagos over many years spent surrounded by textbooks with furrowed brow and earnest legal argument. But the dreamer was only dormant, never dead. And when, in 2020, the world was forced into quarantine, the dreamer returned seeking vengeance. The ghosts in the belltower howled, characters came back to life and a sparkling new world began as Rogba returned to the work of his younger self. Having become a veteran of people-watching, everything about the story took a more delicate shape and the first volume in the trilogy was completed in that unforgettable pandemic year. He found agency representation the next year and then, a year after that, his first book The Dance of Shadows was acquired by Marcus Gipps at Gollancz. In 2024 The Dance of Shadows was let loose. A story infused with the mythology of West Africa that follows the life of a young drummer with magic enough to wage war with the mundane. The sequel, A Testimony of Blood followed soon after. In 2025, The Dance of Shadows picked up the inaugural Aldiss Award for World Building in Speculative Fiction. The final book in the series, will publish in the year 2027. Rogba is now a committed dreamer, building worlds, rendering characters and telling stories that are born in the chaos of total immersion in the imaginative. He lives in London with his better half and spends most of his time writing novels with a speculative edge. |
Connect with Rogba:
rogbapayne.com 