Offscript with Modupe Daramola
How a K-pop obsession steeped in books birthed one of Nigeria’s newest and most dynamic book and literary publishers.
“Every time people ask me, how did you start Noisy Streetss? I wish I had a more serious answer. But it started because of a boy band.”
Modupe Daramola is the CEO and founder of Noisy Streetss, a genuinely unusual organism in the African literary ecosystem. It is part publisher, part agency, part cultural lab. Its latest imprint, Ponmo is a Bird That Has No Place in a Cultured Culinary Sky & Other Stories, carries a title so audacious that it immediately raises a question: what kind of publisher would name a book like this? The answer lies in the unlikely way the company itself came into existence.
Much of Daramola’s story begins in Abeokuta, Ogun State, a city long associated with Nigeria’s literary and artistic tradition. But the deeper influence came from inside her home. Her mother, an obsessive reader, with shelves packed with romance and literary fiction, from Jane Austen to Nora Roberts. “My goal was to have as many books as my mom had,” Daramola recalls. “[She] had thousands of books in her room. She was constantly reading.”
Watching her mother disappear into novels taught her the pleasure of reading at an early age. But another influence helped turn that love into creative ambition: the novelist Yejide Kilanko, Daramola’s godmother and a close friend of her mother. Kilanko’s presence made writing feel real and attainable. Daramola likes to claim that one of the characters in Kilanko’s novel Daughters Who Walk This Path was named after her.
If her mother cultivated her love of books, Kilanko showed her that creating them was possible. By the age of twelve, Daramola had written her first manuscript and sent it to Kilanko for feedback. Another manuscript followed, then another. “I was constantly creating when I was a child,” she says. Yet the books she grew up reading were overwhelmingly Western. She attended a school with a British curriculum and spent much of her formative years immersed in European and American literary canons. African stories were largely absent.
Her parents, like so many Nigerian families before them, looked at a daughter who read a lot, argued, and wrote, and reached the logical conclusion that she should study Law. She didn’t resist. “Even though I wanted to be a writer, I didn’t think it would ever be something I’d ever do in my life. I thought I would just be like my auntie [godmother, Kilanko], in that I write a couple of books, but my main job is actually to be a lawyer.”
She enrolled at Durham University in the United Kingdom, where she planned to pursue a career in human rights and access to justice. Writing, however, refused to disappear. During her first year, she started a blog where she wrote legal commentary on trending issues alongside broader cultural observations. She was also surrounded by a circle of poets and writers who contributed to anthologies and literary projects. In retrospect, she was already living in a literary world; she simply hadn’t accepted it yet. Then the pandemic arrived in 2020.
Daramola had planned to move to London after she graduated and become a barrister. Instead, she was trapped in her apartment with nothing to do but surf the internet. It was during this time that she fell into a YouTube rabbit hole and emerged as an “Army,” a devotee of the Korean boy band BTS.
The band’s leader, Kim Namjoon, is well known for being a reader and an art-inclined person. If she ever met him, she reasoned, she needed something impressive to show for herself. So she gathered her friends on a call and posed the question: What talent could she develop quickly enough to impress a K-pop star? After ruling out singing and photography, a friend reminded her of the old blog. At the time, she wasn’t actively running it. She stopped in her final year on campus to focus on schoolwork.
“One day, what if he reads your blog and reaches out: I love your writing, let’s be together?” the friend said. And so, in December 2020, she relaunched the blog—renamed Noisy Streetss to impress Kim Namjoon.
She laughs as she tells the story now. But she also insists on its importance. “I did not have a deep motivator,” she says. “It was because I liked a boy.” What matters, she argues, is whether the thing you start takes on a life beyond its origin. Noisy Streetss did. Not long after relaunching, Daramola moved back to Nigeria for law school at her parents’ insistence, but kept running the blog, writing social commentary, film and music reviews, and posting occasional photography.
When the law school workload made it impossible for her to write on her own, and she didn’t want to quit the blog because of the Namjoon dream, she opened the blog to other writers. “I invited writers to submit stories to a thing called Love in the New Millennium. They weren’t even paid. All were volunteers, because I didn’t have any money.” That was the first-ever call for submissions on Noisy Streetss.
After completing law school, Daramola faced another crossroads. Her parents wanted her to return to the UK for a master’s degree. Reluctantly, she negotiated for more time in Nigeria. During that period, she joined the legal counsel’s office at Chapel Hill Denham, one of Nigeria’s leading investment firms, initially as an intern. She was later offered a role on the company’s finance team. The move to finance was a bid to buy more time. “I had started to enjoy Lagos and the work I was doing with Noisy Streetss, but I didn’t fully understand yet how big it could become.”
Meanwhile, the platform was evolving. Living in Lagos forced Daramola to rethink the direction of Noisy Streetss. Her original plan had been to build a UK-focused publication, partly because she believed it would offer quicker credibility and easier access to audiences. But being back in Nigeria changed her perspective. She began to notice how few platforms existed where young Nigerians could publish essays, stories or commentary without conforming to established expectations about what African writing should look like.
One early experiment was inspired by the popular podcast Modern Love, which features personal essays about relationships. Daramola wondered why there was no equivalent centred on African experiences. The result was Love Boat, a podcast telling African love stories.
Gradually, Noisy Streetss moved from being a Western-facing blog to a platform dedicated to Nigerian and eventually African voices.
Another turning point arrived in late 2021 during Lagos’s annual end-of-year cultural explosion known as Detty December. Watching the wave of concerts, parties, art shows and social gatherings unfold, Daramola felt a growing sense of urgency. “This thing happening in front of me is a cultural phenomenon,” she remembers thinking. “How do we archive it?” She put out a call for love stories set during that season. The submissions became the Love in Detty December anthology. The latest book, Ponmo is a Bird That Has No Place in a Cultured Culinary Sky & Other Stories, collects some of the strongest pieces from the series’s first three editions.
The move into publishing happened almost accidentally. During an editorial meeting, one of the Noisy Streetss editors expressed excitement about a group of submissions and wondered aloud whether they could become a book. Daramola paused.“What’s the hurdle?” she asked herself.
She began learning how publishing works, experimenting with digital tools, and researching practical steps, such as obtaining an ISBN. One article explaining the process helped demystify it enough for her to try. Soon after, Noisy Streetss released its first print anthology, A Man and a Woman and Other Stories.
Each project strengthened Daramola’s conviction that the venture deserved her full attention.
“My heart had grown so much to accommodate Noisy Streetss,” she says. “It went beyond doing something for Kim Namjoon and BTS. It became something I wanted to give to other people.”
In late 2022, she decided to focus on the venture full-time. The decision was met with some opposition from her parents, but they have gradually become supportive.
In December 2024, she formally registered Noisy Streetss as a publishing company. Her legal and finance training, which she once viewed as detours, had become unexpectedly useful. “Everything came together,” she says. “That’s why I always say you eventually get your way, by the grace of God.” Today, the company deliberately seeks out stories that challenge narrow definitions of African storytelling. Its catalogue includes fiction, essays and poetry that explore contemporary life in ways that feel fresh, strange or unapologetically specific.
Daramola insists that the goal is not to make African stories legible to Western audiences. Instead, the focus is on writing for Africans first. She often points to Korean film and television as an example. Those industries rarely dilute their cultural specificity for international viewers, yet their work travels globally. “People love K-dramas because they’re authentic. They’re not trying to explain themselves to anybody.” That is the future she imagines for Noisy Streetss: stories rooted so deeply in African realities that their specificity becomes their universal appeal.
Daramola still listens to BTS. Kim Namjoon remains her favourite member of the group. But what began as a fan’s playful motivation has evolved into something much larger, a restless drive to publish, amplify and circulate African stories wherever readers might be found.
The boy band, it turns out, was simply the door. The work on the other side had been waiting for her all along.
Amazing!
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️