Ikenna Okpara

I write for the screen and for the page, and I build the places the writing lives.

Twelve of my screenplays have been produced. Blackout opened across more than twenty Nigerian cinemas and was nominated for Best Writing at the AMVCAs. Echezona was made in Igbo, which mattered more to me than the award it was nominated for. Intrusive Thoughts has travelled to festivals in Florence and New York and to the British Film Festival. Two more scripts are in development.

Love Letters is my first novel — thirty-six letters sent, one unfinished reply, seven years of silence, and a chance meeting in a Jos shopping mall. An anthology of short stories, After the Fact, follows it.

Over the past year I have also been building software: an editorial platform, a reading app, a bookshop that carries several publishers at once. Not as a hobby beside the writing. The writing is why the software exists.

I was accidentally educated in the sciences. I hold a BSc in Building — structures, loads, the arithmetic of things standing up — and then writing outbid construction for my life's work. I took an MA in Screenwriting at the London Film Academy instead.

For years those looked like two unrelated halves. Then I wanted a platform for readers and writers, nobody was going to build it for me, and it turned out the first degree had taught me the thing that mattered: a structure either holds or it doesn't, and wanting it to hold is not an argument.

So I learned to build by building, working with AI, from an iPad. The two trades punish you for the same mistake, which is deciding how a thing should feel before you have decided what it does.

Calvary Media UK Ltd was founded in February 2026. Company number 17034179.

It has three arms. Calvary Scribblings publishes fiction, poetry and essays by a new generation of writers, on the web and in the Story Island app. Calvary Films produces. Calvary Radio broadcasts. The bookshop carries our own titles alongside independent publishers in Nigeria and the UK.

The point of all of it is narrow enough to say in one sentence: writers should be read, and paid, without first asking permission from someone who was never going to say yes.

I live between London and Jos.