Category: Literature
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Wale Adenuga; Nigerian cartoonist and comedy show producer. Adenuga created Papa Ajasco and other characters of his skits in the first four years he was running his entertainment company as a one-man business. While an undergraduate, Adenuga became the chief cartoonist of the most popular campus magazine called Viper. Later he developed this vocation into…
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Elebuibon Yemi; Traditionalist from Nigeria. A number of publications by Elebuibon was translated into Spanish and he was a constant invitee to foreign forums notably from North and Latin America consisting often of audiences who like his teaching or initiation into Ifa pantheon. He is a Cultural Adviser to the National Black Theatre in Harlem,…
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Ekwensi Cyprian; Novelist winner of Dag Hamtuarskjold International Merit Award. Ekwensi is one of Africa’s best short story writers of the 20th century. He is noted for his easy style of writing, and his creative works which spans a period of fifty years has been identified by the contemporaneous nature of its themes. Cyprian Ekwensi…
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John Pepper Clark; Nigerian folklorist, poet, essayist and playwright who draws on his graphic experience to empower the poetry, the songs and, indeed, the grandest engagements of his Ijaw people. He is described in biography by Femi Osofisan as the main animating force of African poetry. Clark’s vocation as a poet commenced with Juuenillla, part…
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Ken Saro-Wiwa; Nigerian Environmentalist and author. Ken Saro-Wiwa was the President of the Movement for the Survival of Ogoni People, MOSOP an organisation founded to defend the environmental and human rights of Ogoni people of the Niger Delta. Oil of commercial quantity was found in Ogoniland in 1958, but it also created political problems, environmental…
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Samuel Chinedum Ukala; playwright, poet and writer. Born 1949 in Delta State, Ukala is a professor of Drama and Theatre Arts at the Edo state University, Ekpoma. He is a theoretician in “Folkism”, a dramatic theory for which he is credited as the originator, floklorism being performance apparatus of traditional ‘theatre which aims at recreating…
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Abubakar Adam Ibrahim; Nigerian writer, winner of the 2016 Nigeria Prize for Literature sponsored by the Nigeria LNG Limited. His winning novel, Season of Crimson Blossoms is a sympathetic narrative handling of a most psychologically and emotionally painful tale between an aging widow, who seeks release from her culturally imposed sexual repression, and a young…
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Kaine Agary; Author of Yellow-Yellow, a debut with which she won the 2008 NLNG Nigerian Prize for Literature. Agary was the first new generation writer to win the high-priced award. The 2007 edition produced Mabel Segun and Akachi Adimora-Ezeigbo as joint winners. Agary’s Yellow-Yellow is the story of Zilayefa, a young bi-racial girl in search…
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Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie; Nigerian novelist who having won the Commonwealth Literature prize with, the Purple Hibiscus in 2003 and the Orange Prize with Half of a Yellow Sun in 2006, became a serious sensational writer. Adichie’s unique approach to details in her works, singles her out from the rest. Her first book went on to…
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Chinua Achebe; Nigerian novelist who during the Langston Hughes award in 1993 was praised as the man who through clouds and mists saw the life of the people, whose vision was sharpened by careful watching, uplifting the people of the world’s villages by his vision. Achebe, a professor of English, won the Commonwealth Poetry Prize…