Nigeria House Literature

Helon Habila

Helon Habila studied Literature at the University of Jos and lectured for three years at the Federal Polytechnic, Bauchi, before going to Lagos to write for Hints Magazine. He is a poet and prose fiction writer.

Extracts from his collection of short stories, Prison Stories, were published in Nigeria in 2000. The full text was published as a novel in the UK under the title Waiting for an Angel in 2002 and received a Commonwealth Writers Prize (Africa Region, Best First Book) in 2003. 

Also in 2002, he moved to England to become a Writing Fellow at the University of East Anglia.

Helon Habila also won the MUSON Poetry Prize in 2000 and was the arts editor of the Vanguard Newspaper.

He is currently teaching Creative Writing at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia, where he lives. His second novel, Measuring Time, the tale of twin brothers living in a Nigerian village, was published in 2007, and his latest novel is Oil On Water (2010), shortlisted for the 2011 Commonwealth Writers Prize (Africa Region, Best Book)..

Helon Habila’s novels are stories of individuals discovering and dealing with loneliness, ennui, love affairs that don’t quite work out, political corruption, brutality and violence, and the enduring importance of freedom of expression.

Ade Solanke

Ade Solanke is a playwright and screenwriter, and founder and creative director of Spora Stories, developing and producing high-quality, entertaining, socially-engaged plays and films about the African diaspora.

Ade gained her MFA in Film and Television at the University of Southern California School of Cinematic Arts, where she was a Fulbright Fellow and Phi Beta Kappa International Scholar. She worked as a story analyst for several Hollywood studios and has taught scriptwriting at the University of London and Pan-African University, Nigeria.

Earlier in her career, Ade was voted London's Top Young Entrepreneur for her writing business by Nat West Bank and Shell UK. In collaboration with other diaspora storytellers, Spora explores new story-delivery systems.

Chibundu Onuzor

Chibundu Onuzo was born in Nigeria in 1991 and is the youngest of four children. She is currently studying History at King's College, London. When not writing, Chibundu can be found playing the piano or singing.

The publication of her first novel, The Spider King's Daughter, in 2012 by Faber and Faber was greeted with acclaim for her achievement at getting such a coveted publishing deal at a young age. In June 2012, she was named UK’s Number 1 best black student. The award was given by Rare Rising Stars. She proved to be the first woman to top the list.

Chibundu has since started a blog to promote her book and chips in commentaries on Nigeria, notably a recent article published on the website of the UK Guardian, on the resilience of Nigerians in the face of widespread terrorism.

Rotimi Babatunde

Rotimi Babatunde is a poet, playwright and fiction writer. His short stories have been published in Little Drops, Fiction on the Web, and Mirabilia Review, among other publications, and broadcast on the BBC World Service.

He is a fiction award recipient of New York’s Ludwig Vogelstein Foundation, a winner the Abuja Writer’s Forum Cyprian Ekwensi Prize for short stories, and his story Bombay’s Republic was shortlisted for the 2012 Caine Prize for African Writing. 

Rotimi Babatunde’s plays include An Infidel in the Upper Room (presented at the Royal Court’s Jerwood Theatre Downstairs, at the Institute for Contemporary Arts (ICA), and broadcast on the BBC World Service); The Bonfire of the Innocents (commissioned by Riksteatern, the Swedish National Touring Theatre, and staged in Swedish translation as Elddopet); and A Shroud for Lazarus (world premiere at Halcyon Theatre, Chicago).

He is currently working on a new collaborative theatre project, part of the London 2012/World Stages London, jointly produced by the Royal Court Theatre and the Young Vic.

His poems have been published in Daybreak on the Land, A Volcano of Voices, NT Lit Mag, and translated into German.

His writing has been recognised with literary fellowships by the Fondazione Pistoletto’s Unidee Program and the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Centre in Italy, and by Ledig House and the MacDowell Colony in the United States. Rotimi Babatunde lives in Ibadan, Nigeria.

Zainabu Jallo

Zainabu Jallo was nominated in 2011 by the Royal Court Theatre London, British Council and Ford Foundation Nigeria to join nine other young Nigerians to begin a New Writing from Nigeria project.

In 2008 she was nominated by the same bodies to attend a summer writing residency at the Royal Court Theatre in London. In 2009, she was awarded a fellowship for a three –month residency at The Global Arts village New Delhi, India where she had readings of some of her work. 

Onions Make Us Cry, her second play got published in 2010. The play had a reading at the Contacting The World International Theatre Forum in the same year got nominated for the 2010 Nigeria Prize for Literature.

Onions Make Us Cry was read at the festival of new international plays in March 2011 at the LARK in New York. The play had full performances by the Crown Troupe of Africa in Lagos, Nigeria. In November 2011, Onions make us Cry was announced as one of the six winning plays of the National Studio London, Africa Project.  

Zainabu is one of the playwrights whose work will be featured at the 9th Women Playwrights international conference in Sweden, August 2012.

She has recently been offered a place at the Sundance Theatre Lab as writer in residency 2012 as well as a place in the 2012 Château de Lavigny, Maison d’écrivains Fondation Ledig-Rowohlt Residency Laussane, Switzerland.

Her new play HOLY NIGHT has received a few readings and made it to the final round of the internationalist Playwright Contest with readings in New York later in the year.

Moderator

Sola Adeyemi