Sometimes you meet a student who inspires you – their energy, their activism, their curiosity, and most of all their capacity to capture aspects of the social world and make them feel fresh, authentic and engaging. That’s Onyinye! She has worked since she was 12 years old to support young people, and now she has written her first book – and I have a strong feeling that there are more to come!
Professor of Sociology of Education Meg Maguire, who supervised Onyinye’s dissertation
06 October 2022
22-year-old King's alumna publishes book on personal experience as a Black woman with dyslexia
Onyinye Udokporo, 2020 alumna of the Education, Policy & Society MA, published her first book in September 2022, retracing her journey in academia as a Black woman with dyslexia and offering tips to students on how they can also make the most of their time at university.
The 2018 King’s inaugural ‘Student of the Year’, Onyinye Udokporo was also named as one of 2020’s Top 10 Rare Rising Stars, and is deeply committed to sharing her story to help others in similar situations. After setting up her own tuition business aged 12, she expanded on it while at King’s to transform it into an online education platform and tuition service, called Enrich Learning.
In her book Dyslexia and Me, published by Jessica Kingsley Publishers, Onyinye discusses her experience of being diagnosed dyslexic at 11 years old, starting a business the following year, gaining a scholarship to a prestigious boarding school and going on to complete two degrees by the age of 22, while also being honest about the difficulties she faced throughout, including with bullying and anxiety.
Throughout the book, she uses the learning from her Master’s degree to illuminate wider issues of systemic racism in the educational sector and shed light on what it means to grow up dyslexic in a society where neurodivergence was always presented as a white male issue.
In this story
Entrepreneur, educator and public speaker