Statement
The Nuts and Bolts series – by the Abuja Writers Forum, focuses on the craft of the novel for the October 24 edition, via Zoom from 6-8pm Nigerian Time,with four notable writers: Maaza Mengiste (Ethiopia), Madeleine Thien (Canada), Todd Moss(America) and Helon Habila (Nigeria).
Maaza Mengiste is the author of The Shadow King, shortlisted for the 2020 Booker Prize, and a recipient of the American Academy of Arts & Letters Award in Literature, as well as a LA Times Books Prize finalist. It was named a Best Book of 2019 by New York Times, NPR, Time, Elle, and other publications. Beneath the Lion’s Gaze, her debut, was selected by the Guardian as one of the 10 best contemporary African books.
Madeleine Thien is the author of four books, most recently Do Not Say We Have Nothing, winner of the Giller Prize and a Governor-General’s Literary Award. Her work has been shortlisted for the Booker Prize, The Women’s Prize for Fiction and The Folio Prize, and translated into 25 languages. She teaches literature and writing at Brooklyn College, and is currently a Cullman Fellow at New York Public Library.
Todd Moss, formerly Deputy Assistant Secretary of State and author of the Judd Ryker series, draws on his real-world experiences inside the U.S. Government to bring to life the exhilaration—and frustrations—of modern-day foreign policymaking as evidenced in his Ryker diplomatic thriller series for Penguin’s Putnam Books. His most recent novel is The Shadow List.
Moss is currently Executive Director of the Energy for Growth Hub in Washington DC, a fellow at the Center for Global Development and a nonresident scholar at Rice University’s Baker Institute and the Colorado School of Mines. In addition to fiction, he has written several non-fiction books on international development. Moss holds a PhD from the University of London and a BA from Tufts University. He lives in Maryland with his family.
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 and later join the arts desk of Vanguard Newspaper.
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.
In 2005 Habila was invited by Chinua Achebe to become the first Chinua Achebe Fellow at Bard College, New York. He spent a year writing and teaching at Bard, and after his fellowship, Habila stayed on in America as a professor of Creative Writing at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia.
His other novels are Measuring Time (2007), Oil On Water (2010), and Travellers (2019). In 2015 Helon Habila won the Windham-Campbell Literature Prize for literary achievement.
The Zoom details for the event are –
Meeting ID: 882 9489 2629
Passcode: 191094
Meeting Link :
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/88294892629?pwd=bjRlbFVnNVRRRDhiTi9QcmdGQmp0QT09
▪︎ By A.D.Dabra, Publicity Secretary, Abuja Writers Forum.