GROWING UP, bestselling domestic fiction author Funmi Anu Bankole had to sell drinks on the streets of Lagos to supplement her family’s income.

Ever since then she has strived for prosperity to ensure her own children would have a better start in life than she had. Unfortunately, her goal of achieving this through the property market was fraught with many difficulties.

Finally, however, she is now achieving success as an author of emotive family dramas with a moral centre.

When the Covid pandemic swept the world unexpectedly last year, Funmi Anu Bankole found herself in a difficult situation.

Since moving to the UK from her native Nigeria at the start of the 1990s, she had worked tirelessly to build up a property portfolio to provide her family with a better standard of living than she had experience growing up.

The property market has its peaks and troughs, and Funmi had weathered them all, but the arrival of the virus was a different matter entirely. She soon found to her horror that her tenants were unable to keep up with their rent payments because they, like millions others, had suddenly found themselves with no jobs to go to.

It was then that a close friend made a suggestion that would change Funmi’s life. After listening to Funmi relate her life story and experiences, they suggested that it would make for a great book.

Having enjoyed creative writing as a child, she took up the challenge, beginning work on what would become her first novella, the semi-autobiographical Turning Point.

Since then, she has written and published a further five books, including an autobiographical examination of her Christian faith, Who Is God?, and has quickly earned a reputation as the literary queen of domestic drama.

While her stories are stand-alone works, each of her novellas—which also include The Boss, The Prodigal Daughter, Women In Waiting, and Born To Reign—are thematically connected by two things.

Firstly, they all share an instructional and inspirational message about the importance of succeeding in life, acquiring wealth and social comfort for the sake of the family. Secondly, they are all underpinned by Funmi’s unwavering faith in God and her guiding principle that hard work and righteous living will ultimately be rewarded.

Each of the novellas revolve around a woman who faces extreme hardships in her life—a string of miscarriages in Women In Waiting, rejection by her family in Turning Point, and children who turn to crime in The Boss, for instance—but who ultimately bounces back better than before after welcoming God back into her life.

“All my books draw upon real-life experiences, either my own or upon those of the collective,” says Funmi, who is also a health worker.

“Anything can prove to be the inspiration that triggers my next story, such as things that I have encountered personally, or have observed through others, including stories in the press.

“The central character is typically a hard-working lady who wants to achieve but has so far failed to do so. In this respect, I use my younger self as inspiration: the toiling girl who dreams of one day becoming a princess and living in a palace.”

This aspiration for material security can easily be understood when looking at Funmi’s childhood.

Born in Nigeria’s former capital, Lagos, Funmi’s parents struggled to feed their seven children and so, aged just nine years old, she started working as a street seller to help supplement the family’s meagre income.

“It was a hard life,” she remembers. “I was the second eldest child and used to help my mum selling things on the streets of Lagos.

“I’d go to school and then when I came back I’d have to go on the street, selling hot drinks in winter and cold drinks in summer.

“It used to make me sad. I wondered why I had to go through all this just to have food on the table when many young girls could buy and do what they liked.

Despite this, Funmi did her best to excel at school, recognising that a good education was the key to building a better life.

“I always tried to do my homework as I knew that education would be my escape,” she adds. “My work ethic was only strengthened when, as a teenager, I discovered the Bible and began going to church, acting on a compulsion that God needed to be part of my life and the unshakable feeling that I wouldn’t be able to achieve anything without Him as part of the equation.”

Once grown up, Funmi left Nigeria for Britain, believing that it would be provide more opportunities for achieving the financial stability she had always yearned for.

As recounted in the semi-autobiographical novella Turning Point, however, her plan to achieve this through property was not the fast track to wealth that she had originally imagined.

Using her job in healthcare to secure her first home, she entered into a complex chain of remortgaging to acquire further properties in quick succession.

However, the monthly pressures of meeting repayments, combined with the fluctuations in the market—especially in the wake of the Great Recession of 2007—meant that she was still as poor as when she first started out, if not poorer.

Funmi says: “I worked around the clock, doing 16-hour days, and all my income would go on maintaining the properties and keeping up with the mortgage payments so the banks wouldn’t repossess.

“On the outside it seemed like I had money but the reality was that I never had free cash. I had a young family yet I couldn’t send them on holiday or pay their school fees.

“Life was so stressful at that time. The kids weren’t happy and nobody seemed to understand that I was doing it all for their sakes.”

Thankfully, life has improved dramatically for Funmi in the last 12 months. When the reopening of society, she has been able to sell several properties and bring her remaining portfolio back under control, while also enjoying a new revenue stream as a bestselling author.

Funmi is currently working on her next two novellas, including the intriguingly titled The Dancing Horse, and has no intentions of slowing down.

“I write because I want to pass on my experiences to others,” she says. “My greatest desire is to have my readers learn from my failures and my successes, and those of others who have endured and overcome significant life challenges.

“The only way to win is to stay positive and keep on moving forward, no matter the obstacles you face. As the expression goes, God helps those who help themselves.”

All six of Funmi Anu Bankole’s books—Turning Point, Born To Reign, The Prodigal Daughter, Women In Waiting, The Boss, and Who Is God—are available from her website, www.FunmiAnuBankole.com, priced individually at £2.99 in eBook format, £5.99 for three or £9.99 for all six titles.