• B.Sc. (with honors), University of London, 1972
• New Statesman Jock Campbell Award for literature by new or unregarded talent from Africa or the Caribbean, 1978
• New Statesman Jock Campbell Award for Commonwealth Writers, The Slave Girl, 1979
• Best Black British Writer 1978
• British Home Secretary's Advisory Council on Race, 1979 — current
• Arts Council of Great Britain - 1982 to 1983
• One of the Best British Young Writers, 1983
• PhD, University of London, 1991

Collected shorts and anthologies

• In the Ditch (London: Allison & Busby, 1972)
• Adah's Story [In the Ditch/Second-Class Citizen] (London: Allison & Busby, 1983)

Novels

• Second-Class Citizen (London: Allison & Busby, 1974)
• The Bride Price (London: Allison & Busby, 1976)
• The Slave Girl (London: Allison & Busby, 1977) — winner of the 1979 Jock Campbell Award
• The Joys of Motherhood (London: Allison & Busby, 1979)
• The Moonlit Bride (Oxford University Press, 1976)
• Our Own Freedom (Photographs by Maggie Murray), (Sheba, 1981)
• Destination Biafra (London: Allison & Busby, 1982)
• Naira Power (1982)
• The Rape of Shavi (1984)
• Double Yoke (New York: George Braziller, Inc., 1983)
• Gwendolen (1989)
• Kehinde (1994)
• The New Tribe

Children’s/Young Adults

• Titch the Cat (London: Allison & Busby, 1979)
• Nowhere to Play (London: Allison & Busby, 1980)
• The Wrestling Match (1980)

Plays

• A Kind of Marriage, BBC television
• Family Bargain, BBC television 1987

Articles

• Observations of the London Poor (1971 article that became the novel In the Ditch)
• Black Scholar, November-December, (1985), p. 51.
• Head Above Water (1986; autobiography)
• Criticism and Ideology, (1988)
• Essence, August, (1990), p. 50.
• New York Times Book Review, April 29, (1990).
• Publishers Weekly, February 16 (1990), p. 73; reprinted February 7, (1994), p. 84.
• World Literature Today, Autumn (1994), p. 867.