Chris Abani has made money from his lies, but he did it because he thought it is a cunning way to sell his art. He has now established himself as a bona-fide writer, it's time to let go the lies and let true history stand! He should learn like other decent writers to sell his art on its own merit, not on the prop of fat, destructive lies that emotionally swindle people...

The bird wanted to be a child.  It wanted to take the heart from its body and place it in the child so that the child could have its heart. Of all the things of creation, even more than the stars, it thought that children had more secrets for they have just left heaven and they transport messages from one harbor to another, one imagination to another. It wanted to know the secrets that have made others so happy...

If you look closely at the hype surrounding soccer and soccer greats, you will notice that the clubs that own the players and the organisations that control the tournaments are the cheerleaders in this mania. In other words, the game is being gobbled up by the monster that is commercialisation...

Outside football and Nollywood, literature is one boon even Nigeria’s most rabid haters agree we have given the world. Our writers continue to bring pride to Nigeria with their solid achievements. Prizes might not be the best way of assessing literary impact but for our writers, both the grandees and grandchildren, to continuously win laurels on an almost annual basis imply that we are getting it right...

Before her death, in a small room at the end of an oil-stained hallway, Zora Neale Hurston was working on her book on Herod the great. According to source, Zora “spent years researching and rewriting this book, and trying to interest others in the story.” Before his death, Albert Camus was writing the autobiographical, The First Man. If Camus felt the need to tell of his Algerian childhood, Zora wanted people to understand Herod's grand significance to larger issues of Christianity, Civilization and Conflicts.
 
But Zora was by then living the pointed particulars of home for the poor, all of her prior courage and life crowded into an undersized studio apartment in a two-storey public housing somewhere in southern USA. Imagine her moving about her one-room apartment, bent slightly forward from the cruelties of poverty and physical illnesses; imagine the stylishness of her hat as her tobacco-stained fingers strain for the door knob...the marks on the thin layer of grime scratched permanently on that door knob baring all the specifics of suffering, abandonment and neglect...
 
...imagine that on reaching the door, that frail stubborn gesture upsets the small heap of discoloured foolscap papers on which, for three years straight, braced against the chill of indifference outside, she typed out a kind of 'A Story of the World'...the manuscript scatters about as she falls slowly to her knees in no small amount of pain to gather each leaf closer to her bended knee…
 
By his death, widely cited as 'proponent' of a philosophical movement that would capture the universal imagination, Camus had compiled a significant amount of his own particular upbringing…

The First Man was published posthumously in 1995.
I haven’t been able to find the book on Herod the great.

Asked about rejections, E.C. Osondu admits that he had his fair share, sometimes leading him to question what he was doing wrong. Now he says, he keeps all his rejections in his basement in a bag, to remind him of the tortuous journey he has faced; including the frustration of experiencing multiple rejections having left his successful career in advertising in Nigeria to go to graduate school to study creative writing in the US...

Today, The Foxhole which has already been graced by literary greats such as J.P. Clark Bekeredemo, Odia Ofeimun; renowned writers Akachi Adimora Ezeigbo, Toni Kan and the recent author of the ant eaters, Kufre Ekanem, is a pleasant reality. Omo Uwaifo, a late and worthy entrant into the Nigerian literary geography, unlike many accomplished, even institutionalized writers, is giving back to society...

Poets are seers. Poets are always performance driven. They live to see their words impinge on others who do not see the world as they do. The gift of words they are bestowed with, although temporary, like a crest of a wave, makes its indelible mark, shapes the intellect psychically without permission being granted by any one living thing...

The heart of man is naturally corrupted and the things we used to see, that made our lives sing with hope and dance with rapture also pass by quickly, and quietly. But the truth is still hidden and the stories that we want to tell live with us as we grow with the rivers. We sometimes look for our stories from some other place, except ourselves. I wonder why we do not look within to find the best stories that will give our lives meaning...

In developed economies of the world where the basic necessities of life seem to have been met, the question as to whether the arts are relevant or not to practical living is no longer an issue. Thousands of American citizens would troop down to the auditorium in Bard College to hear Chinua Achebe's reading of his Things Fall Apart, not minding that they have heard the same reading over and over again, not minding that the book is over fifty years old...

The nursery of any writer is school, literacy and education from a young age. Yet schools are still divided. There are schools for the rich and schools for the poor. There are writers and poets for the rich and writers and poets for the poor. There are writers for God’s children knocking on every conceivable door in this day and age. Orphans, children growing up in poverty; weak, innocent, malnourished, abandoned and neglected...

Earlier in one lone week out of the now many blurry ones in my childhood memory, my father had unknowingly satisfied too much of my recurring curiosity by telling me how he got the tribal marks on his own face. He was born in the early forties when it was still acceptable and admirable for parents from his side of Yorubaland to scarify the faces of their children as markers of culture, tribe, social standing or just plain beauty...

Morning has coughed a dark mist on the town square. It has become truant and roguish in its mannerisms. Decades ago, it sighed with freshness, its visage displaying dimples of joy. Those were the days...Now it smokes industrial gases without a filter in its greenhouse tent of pilgrimage...

Over the years most of my Nigerian friends have wondered at the letters I used to get from Brutus, the legendary South African poet, author of A Simple Lust, Letters to Martha, Sirens, Knuckles and Boots, etc. Brutus and I have travelled the Lagos streets, and he lamented the shame that there were still open drains on Nigerian streets. But Brutus was not all complaints and seriousness, for he once suggested that we should co-author a book of erotica!

I have absolutely no problem with the term, “African writer,” I am an African writer. Everything depends on context. And it is true that we are the sum of our experience and folks are right to protest any definition that in their view limits the range of their identity and their life’s work. But I do think Gappah protests too much...

Nigeria, it appears, doesn’t offer Nigerians much of the positive side of the human experience. Why wouldn’t Nigerian writers write about what they experienced? When, for example, an Ogoni young man eventually begins to tell his story, what do we expect this story to be like? If he accuses Nigeria of having failed him, would any of us blame him for washing our dirty linen in the public?