By Godwin Okondo
NIGERIA’S literary scene came alive last Sunday, August 3, 2025 as the Committee for Relevant Art (CORA), in partnership with The Nigeria Prize for Literature, sponsored by Bonny, Rivers State based gas company, NLNG, hosted its vibrant yearly Book Party in Lagos to celebrate the 11 authors longlisted for the 2025 edition of the prestigious award. The event featured captivating book readings and an excursion into the minds of the 11 writers whose books have been longlisted for the prize worth USD$100,000. However, out of the 11 writers, only two participated physically while the other nine joined virtually from their respective bases abroad. It also brought together writers and literary enthusiasts and members of the media in a spirited celebration of storytelling, creativity and networking.
The conversation was expertly moderated by the publisher and MD of Purple Shelves Publishing, Amarachukwu Chimeka, who guided the discussion with insightful questions that fostered engaging conversations from the authors. However, she did not give room for audience members to ask questions after the pre-recorded readings of the 11 books had been done, led by ace actors Bimbo Manuel, Edmond Enaibe and Tunbosun Aiyedehin. This was as the proceeding was guided by culture communicator and CORA Prog. Chair, Mr. Jahman Anikulapo.
The 2025 longlist features a distinguished lineup of authors and their works: Yewande Omotoso (An Unusual Grief), Linda N. Masi (Fine Dreams), Michael Afenfia (Leave My Bones in Saskatoon), Uwem Akpan (New York, My Village), Ayo Oyeku (Petrichor: The Scent of a New Beginning), Oyin Olugbile (Sanya), Chika Unigwe (The Middle Daughter), Chigozie Obioma (The Road to the Country), Nikki May (This Motherless Land), Chioma Okereke (Water Baby), and Abubakar Adam Ibrahim (When We Were Fireflies).
The author of An Unusual Grief, Omotosho said she’d always wanted to write about her mother’s passing, but she always felt it “would be too on the nose, a bit too much a biography about her,” and then it occurred to her that what if it’s about someone you’re “estranged from but that you had a good connection with, people you’d fought with and hadn’t spoken to in a while and estranged from, that’s a kind of grief. So I really wanted to explore that.” And it became the creative backbone for An Unusual Grief that scaled the hurdle of over 250 entries and made it to the longlist.
In 2015, Masi was in Port Harcourt working, and then news from the north broke about people who were losing family members to insurgency and grieving over them, and “it just reminded me of when my mum lost my dad. It was very touching,” she said. Fine Dreams started as a short story but soon morphed into a novel with “different stories connected together, after finding a stronger voice,” and stemming from different voices, with Masi noting that “the failure of surveillance in the country in the way it could have helped to curb insecurity” fueled her creative imagination to write Fine Dreams.
Afenfia, author of Leave My Bones in Saskatoon, said the idea for his book came shortly after he moved to Canada. “A colleague from work asked me to accompany her to one of the cemeteries in Saskatoon,” he said. “Some people go out for fancy dates to fancy restaurants, but we ended up in a cemetery. So, that’s how weird I am. Just being there triggered something in me—that reflection like I’m here, I have my roots in Nigeria, my parents buried in Nigeria, and it just kind of made me think where this whole journey was going to end. Is it just our flesh that stays here, and at the end of the day, our bones find their way somewhere else?”
He added that about the same time, news broke about the discovery of unmarked graves, some containing children buried as far back as the 1960s, and “it made me reflect, because at the end of the day, we thrive, we strive, and when the race is over, nobody cares about your race or gender—you just end up being buried. So that was a kind of trigger to do a story that touches on identity, questions our humanity, and examines what borders and boundaries really mean to us.”
Akpan, author of New York, My Village, whose book is perhaps more inclusive of what it means to be Nigerian, said his motivation came from the need to tell the largely untold stories of minority communities in Biafra. “So many books have been written about Biafra, but very little has been written about minority Biafra,” he said. “It shocked me to my bones that most people, even here in Yorubaland, did not know there were minorities in Biafra. Many still thought it was just the Igbo. I go to northern Nigeria, it’s the same thing. Even in Benin City, it’s the same thing. But I am an Anang person, and there are about 40 other tiny minority groups that were in Biafra. We suffered a lot.”
He explained that in some places, Biafran forces occupied minority land for eight months, only to be replaced by Nigerian forces who, he said, “became another Biafra to us.” Fear and isolation, he noted, kept these communities silent for over 50 years. “It’s not just for the sake of the minorities; it’s for the sake of the whole country. If Nigeria is to rise, to thrive, to succeed, everybody needs to be represented,” Akpan said.
He added that the lack of awareness about Nigeria’s other 400 ethnic groups (apart from Yoruba, Igbo and Hausa/Fulani) also fuels ongoing violence in places like Plateau, Tiv land and southern Kaduna. “Every few years, they are killed, and you won’t see it on CNN or BBC. These are minority areas, so we minorities must stand up and be counted,” he said. Akpan expressed gratitude to his Igbo, Northern and Yoruba friends, who helped him research and write the book, New York, My Village. “I’m encouraged. I think we have enough unity. I know it’s still fragile, but we have enough to listen to each other and try to make everyone belong.”
Oyeku, author of Petrichor: The Scent of a New Beginning, said his inspiration came from a lifelong struggle to understand how injustice can be confronted. His first personal encounter with it, he recalled, was in 2002, shortly after gaining admission into university. A student protest had broken out over the detention of the Student Union Government president, and Oyeku, caught up in the excitement, joined in.
“In the process, some police vans arrived and tried to disperse the crowd,” he said. “Being very naïve, I just stood there. The police came out, pulled the trigger, and I wondered if it was a canister or a gun. Then the bullets rang out, and the guy standing next to me shoved me away. By the time I fell and tried to get back up, he was already in a pool of blood.”
Oyeku fled and found refuge in the home of an elderly woman for over an hour until the chaos subsided. When he returned to town, other students were preparing for another round of protest, vowing to burn down the police station. “For me, as a Yoruba boy, they would say you almost lost your life — you don’t go back to risk it again,” he said. The school was eventually shut down for three months.
When classes resumed, a friend introduced him to one of the men injured during the protest — the same man who had pushed him out of the line of fire. “I told him, ‘You saved my life during the protest,’ but he said he regretted it,” Oyeku said. The man explained that, in the heat of the moment, it had seemed like the right thing to do, but the consequences had been severe. “He was an only child, his mother a widow, and she collapsed several times after hearing he had been shot. The police had thrown him, still bleeding, into the back of a truck, driven him to the station and locked him in a cell. If the students hadn’t returned to protest again, he might have died there.”
That encounter, Oyeku said, left him with a deep awareness of the personal costs of injustice and a lasting curiosity about how to fight it. Over the years, he found parallels in Nigeria’s history, from the civil war to the Bayelsa massacre, the #EndSARS protests, and even smaller tragedies like the killing of a child in a school playground.
His decision to write Petrichor was finally shaped in 2024 after he read a disturbing account of an Anglican priest in the UK who had sexually and physically abused children in the 1970s, drowned some of them, and was protected by the church. The priest fled to Africa, moved between countries, and repeated his crimes before disappearing in South Africa. Decades later, families seeking justice finally tracked him down, but he died mysteriously before he could be extradited.
In Petrichor, Oyeku channels these reflections into the story of Jola, a boy from a modest background who wins a scholarship with dreams of a bright future, only to fall into the hands of an Anglican reverend who molests him. “When Jola tries, with the help of his mother, to get justice, they fail, and he gives up entirely — until he meets Chinelo in 1999. Chinelo becomes that scent of a new beginning which he calls Petrichor,” Oyeku said. “The whole book is about finding justice and being able to raise our awareness to meet our personal life’s journey.”
Olugbile, author of Sanya, said her journey to writing the novel began unexpectedly, rooted in memories from her university days. “I studied Theatre Arts at the University of Lagos and, sorry to say, all through my four years, I hated being in class,” she admitted. “I was one of those children who wanted to study something else. I ended up in theatre arts because my dad said, ‘Listen, you can’t miss this year’s admission. Just get into school.’ I wanted to be a lawyer.”
Despite her lack of interest at the time, she said the lessons stayed with her. “We studied very interesting topics, from mythological gods and all of that, but I never thought they would matter to me later,” she said. After graduating, she immediately enrolled at Lagos Business School and embarked on a career as a consultant in social impact, leaving theatre arts far behind. But that changed in 2016 while she was doing research for a non-profit organisation focused on education.
“Midway in the research, I stumbled upon the story of Sango again, and I think I had that residual memory from school,” Olugbile said. “While doing proper index research, I realised a lot of things did not add up. In Africa, the way we tell our stories is usually through folklores, and sometimes even the childish whispers that someone told someone else until it becomes a different kind of story. The character of Sango, for me, didn’t just add up. Somewhere, I think, he has been misrepresented, and I felt I had a different version of how it could have been told. I told my husband, ‘I think I’m going to write it.’”
Olugbile began writing in 2016–2017, completed the work in 2020, and saw it published in 2022, after five to six years of in-depth research into African mythology and storytelling. She said preserving these traditions was central to her motivation. “It is necessary to tell African mythology and African stories for the sake of future generations. I live here in the UK, and I’ve lived in the United States, with children who didn’t even understand or have knowledge of our rich African culture. I believe that for us to keep it for the future, we must pass it on through African storytelling — to give them hope that there is a possibility things can be preserved in Africa beyond people just looking for money. Storytelling is that legacy we can pass on to the generation here now and the one to come.”
The author of The Middle Daughter, Unigwe, said the journey to completing the novel demanded that she stepped into some of the most unsettling spaces she had ever entered as a writer. “Every book is a different book and I’m not a very confident writer,” she admitted. “Every book brings its set of challenges and, for The Middle Daughter, one of the biggest was going into the darkest heart of some of these characters and allowing them to write themselves without trying to stop them.”
She spoke candidly about the emotional strain of writing such morally troubling figures. “For example, one of the characters, Ephraim — each time I wrote him, I had to take a shower because I felt very dirty. And I had to persist. I think I’ve been lucky in the sense that when I’m writing, the characters tend to write themselves, and all I am just a conduit for them through which they write. I had to allow Ephraim to show me the extent of his vileness, because that was the only way I could write him truthfully. When you’re not writing your characters truthfully, it shows on paper when the readers are reading them.”
For Unigwe, the challenge was not only technical but deeply psychological — facing characters she found personally repulsive yet refusing to sanitize them for her own comfort. “One of the biggest challenges was just writing characters that I cannot stand, characters that I really despise, but I have to treat with integrity,” she said. “That’s my job as a writer — to bring out my characters and allow them to be as they want to be on the page, without allowing my own prejudices and bias kill them.”
The author of The Road to the Country, Obioma, described his approach to storytelling as an unplanned but deliberate filling of gaps within African literature. “I’ve always joked that I do the dirty job of African literature,” he said with a laugh. “By serendipity, I find myself doing stuff that has not been really done, at least to my knowledge.”
He explained that this impulse shaped his second novel, which he embarked on because he saw a glaring absence. “There was no cosmological novel in the likes of Milton’s Paradise Lost or Dante’s Inferno, and I thought, we have all these cosmologies, so why don’t we write something like that? I did it with the Igbo cosmology” in An Orchestra of Minorities.
With The Road to the Country, Obioma turned his attention to the Nigerian Civil War, a subject deeply personal to him. “I wanted to write about Biafra because I lost a lot of relatives in that war. It was very brutal. My immediate mum’s older brother, for instance, was killed, I think in the first two weeks of the war, and he was only 19.”
However, his research revealed a surprising literary pattern. “I found that all the books that have been written about the war are mostly what I’d call wartime fiction — where the battles and the war itself are in the background, rather than foregrounded as the main focus. There is no war novel I can think of that really captures it in the way All Quiet on the Western Front or 1917 does. The closest is Sozaboy by Ken Saro-Wiwa, which I think in my estimation is about 40–50% war novel. So I decided to write one.”