Nigeria

When Oris Aigbokhaevbolo declared Nigerian literature dead, he did not do so casually. He was not lamenting a temporary lull or the disappearance of a few magazines. He was naming what he saw as a fundamental failure of formation. There was, in his account, no stable literary life to grow into. Writing appeared intensely, briefly, […]

Novels often build toward closure, offering readers a resolution or tying loose ends, but in Dream Count, Adichie resists this expectation. She leaves you with crescendoed emotions, emphasising her central concern: the elusive nature of dreams as mediated through memory. This, alongside the novel’s interrogation of how privilege grants and strips women of agency, forms […]

Long after the last fire was put out in this old restaurant, the pot goes on smouldering. The band is in the area designated as the stage, tuning instruments. In a corner, a handful of young artists and intellectuals are arguing over some tedious philosophical point. Eau de Bohème, Édition Afrique. Liquor chases down smoke […]

The strange thing about Africa is how past, present and future come together in a kind of rough jazz – Ben Okri (A review of South Side, Akin Adesokan, Parresia Publishers, Lagos, 2025) Abel Dankor is an itinerant writer whose life reads like the typical life of every or most Africans; stateless and always in […]

From 252 entries down to 11 longlisted authors, The Nigeria Prize for Literature have pruned their list down to three finalists. This year’s panel of judges is chaired by Associate Professor Saeedat Bolajoko Aliyu of the Department of English, Kwara State University. Other members of the panel include Professor Stephen Mbanefo Ogene, Professor of Comparative […]

An honest witness does not lie, a false witness breathes lies. –Proverbs 14:5 “No more Big 3, there’s now a Big 4,” the Nigerian Afrobeats star Rema declared in his 2024 song “HEHEHE.” Rema’s statement, fans of Afrobeats are meant to believe, is declarative: the Nigerian music industry has had three main stars—Davido, Wizkid, and […]

In February 2024, we sat with Nobel Laureate Wọlé Ṣóyínká as part of the production of Ebrohimie Road: A Museum of Memory — a documentary biopic that examines a location at the University of Ìbàdàn where he lived briefly when he was appointed as the first Nigerian Head of the School of Drama. It was […]

I became afraid of Molue buses the day my mother told me how my closest cousin, Anifa, lost her parents. It was an accident: a molue lost its brakes at the Oshodi-Abeokuta expressway and rammed into their car, injuring and killing several people. I remember riding on the bus a few times with my mom, […]

 If his debut collection, Where the Baedeker Leads: A Poetic Journey, enacts place-centric imagination and diasporic consciousness, James Yeku’s latest work, A Phial of Passing Memories, articulates further “memoir-poetic” narratives in 60 poems coordinated in five sections that detail diverse encounters in moments and places. His poetry picks on well-ranged, everyday experiences: birth, parenting, death, […]

Foluso Agbaje’s remarkable debut, The Parlour Wife, is likely the first novel many will read that focuses on the impact of the Second World War on an African population, with African characters squarely at its centre, and by an African author. The main setting is Lagos, the coastal city that was at the heart of […]