Helon Habila, the award-winning Nigerian writer, has received the highly coveted Lifetime Achievement Award at the just concluded 2024 Kaduna Book & Arts Festival which took place in Kaduna, Nigeria.
The award, which was presented to him by the Governor of Kaduna State, Senator Uba Sani, had previously been won by other notable Nigerian authors such as Zaynab Alkali and Labo Yari.
Habila, the author of four critically acclaimed novels and several seminal works, was the first Chinua Achebe Fellow at Bard College in New York in 2005. He is currently a Professor of Creative Writing at George Mason University in Virginia, USA.
He is also on the board of the Africa Writers Trust, an organisation that promotes African writers and writing.
Born in Gombe State, the 56-year-old Habila is a novelist and poet whose writing has won many prizes, including the Music Society of Nigeria (MUSON) national poetry award in 2000, the Caine Prize for African writing in 2001, and the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize (Africa Region, Best First Book in 2002.
His books include: Prison Stories (2000), Waiting for an Angel, a novel (2004), Measuring Time, a novel (2007), Oil on Water, a novel (2010), The Chibok Girls (2016), a non-fiction social novel, and Travelers, a novel (2019).
