Victoria Nwankpa - Writing Love Stories Across Worlds.
- Mark Walmsley FRSA AGSM
- Jun 16
- 4 min read
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Meet Victoria Nwankpa.
In this interview, I invited Victoria Nwankpa to create her fantasy cultural year from the answers to some easy questions to which there were no wrong answers. Expect insights, surprises, laughter, anecdotes and conversational detours.
Victoria Nwankpa is a fiction writer based in Nigeria, with plans to relocate to the UK by the end of 2026. A passionate storyteller, she has been writing for the past six years and works primarily across romance, fantasy, and paranormal fiction.
Her recently published book, The Art of Forgetting You, is a romance novel set in Lagos and marks an important milestone in her writing journey. Through her work, Victoria explores love, memory, emotion, identity, and the complicated ways people find, lose, and rediscover one another.
As she prepares for her move to the UK, Victoria is keen to build relationships with writers, creatives, publishers, workshop leaders, and fellow storytellers. She is particularly interested in connecting with UK-based writers and Nigerian creatives in the diaspora, both to expand her professional network and to continue developing her voice as an author.
Warm, thoughtful, and ambitious, Victoria represents a new generation of globally minded writers—rooted in one culture, curious about many others, and eager to tell stories that travel.
Cosimo Cavallaro's Fantasy Cultural Year ... with a magic wand and a time machine to hand.
Victoria Nwankpa’s Fantasy Cultural Year begins exactly where a romance writer might want it to begin: in Paris.
Placed within sight of the Eiffel Tower on a warm June evening, Victoria imagines herself sitting at a café with an Orange Fanta beside her and her own recently published book, The Art of Forgetting You, on the table. It is a quietly cinematic opening: the writer, the city, the book, the promise of everything still to come.
From there, the fantasy becomes a global writing commission. A family foundation offers Victoria the opportunity to travel the world first class, fully supported, while writing a series of romance novels set in different cities.
The project would become a box set of ten books, with a television crew following the journey, a major publishing deal, a TED Talk, and global lectures on romance fiction, creativity, and storytelling.
The first destination is Paris—the City of Love and the City of Light—an obvious but perfect beginning for a writer whose work explores romance and emotional memory. From there, Victoria’s journey moves north to Helsinki, where the year takes on rhythm and movement. Asked to choose a dance-based performance, she selects salsa, leading to an imagined visit to the World Salsa Championships. It is a beautiful fit: romantic, passionate, expressive, and full of the physical energy that often sits beneath great love stories.
Music becomes an important part of the journey. Faced with the challenge of listening to one genre for a year, Victoria chooses R&B, with artists such as Beyoncé, Taylor Swift, and others forming part of her soundtrack. The choice gives her cultural year a contemporary, emotional, and highly expressive musical pulse.
The next stage takes her to Los Angeles, where sport becomes performance. Victoria chooses tennis, a game of discipline, elegance, timing, resilience, and psychological tension—qualities that also belong to good fiction. In the context of her imaginary writing year, Los Angeles becomes another possible backdrop for a love story: ambition, glamour, competition, and personal reinvention.
From California, Victoria travels to Mexico City, where she visits a digitally enhanced art gallery and steps inside Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa. The choice is revealing. The Mona Lisa is famous not simply because of what it shows, but because of what it withholds. Its mystery, ambiguity, and emotional restraint offer rich imaginative territory for a novelist drawn to romance, memory, and unresolved feeling.
Finally, the journey returns to London, the city that may soon become part of Victoria’s real future. Here, her cultural week becomes a celebration of music, theatre, opera, film, and personal joy. She imagines attending a dream concert featuring Chris Brown, Beyoncé, and Taylor Swift, visiting Shakespeare’s Globe for Romeo and Juliet, seeing a Broadway-style Hannah Montana live experience, and attending Bizet’s Carmen at the Royal Opera House.
The week ends with film night, where Victoria chooses horror—specifically The Conjuring. It is a wonderfully unexpected choice, but entirely consistent with a writer who works not only in romance, but also fantasy and paranormal fiction. Love and fear, after all, are two of the most powerful forces in storytelling.
Her hero lunch brings the fantasy back to something deeply personal. Rather than choosing a celebrity or historical figure, Victoria chooses her husband. In the twist that follows, he invites a Liverpool player—perhaps Mohamed Salah—turning the lunch into a moment of warmth, humour, and shared life.
Victoria’s Fantasy Cultural Year is romantic, global, playful, and full of narrative possibility. It reveals a writer drawn to emotion, movement, performance, beauty, mystery, and connection—the raw materials of stories that travel well beyond borders.
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Mark Walmsley FRSA FCIM AGSM
Chief Culture Vulture
Arts & Culture Network
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Chief Culture Vulture
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