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?

I am the wind. I have disappointed myself and I feel the effects of that betrayal deep in my soul. The waters are still clean but they are completing an effect that will forever be here with those cool winds of the evening. I guess I long for my waters that make me fresh and clean. I am the wind....

Let those who want to be real poets return to their desks, to their privacy, to their consciences, where the only prize is the rigour of writing, the quest to touch humanity, the desire to surpass the self. It is hard to accept: paradoxically, literary prizes, in Nigeria and abroad, have reduced the worth of our literature!

I see no reason why the tide of bad news in Nigeria can not be stopped. Perhaps all it takes is a change of heart that begins with a radical rejection of the thought that the West is only interested in grubbing in the African compost...

Whilst a reading culture will not, in and of itself, resolve all of our problems, as there is a huge gap between knowledge and know-how, it will at least cause more of our youth to think and question their government’s actions and inaction and hold them to greater account...

In South Africa, Omoseye Bolaji's readers are legion. In Free State libraries alone, thousands of copies of his books are available. He is one author who knows how to grip and enthrall readers. He hardly strives for literary aesthetics, but this does not mean he’s entirely pedestrian. Because of his prolific publications, many people tend to overlook the fact that Omoseye Bolaji is actually a versatile writer...

Time had happened to my parents’ pain. The Pain had been worn down by the salts of loss in the washing of brine, the ebb and flow of sorrow. It had preserved the hurt in the recesses of their memories and had sealed it hermetically. It had economized their loss...

It is too glaring that Habila did not do any special re-working on his Prison Stories but hurriedly re-packaged it under a different title as a novel. Thence comes the failure of Waiting for an Angel as a novel.  Short stories, no matter how mystically re-arranged, cannot make a novel...

What is colour? Why is it important for me to want more of colour from this wave of mist that is floating in and out of itself? It is reality still that is forever changing even though it is in one shape and essence. I am awed still...

As a poet, Ms Verissimo is versatile as well as judicious in her use of literary mechanics to furnish poems with a fluid progression. Like the Free Verse poet she is, her style borders more on internal rhythm than rhyme and stanzas. And her stanzas, often uneven, neither mince nor maneuver words...

What does it take to win this coveted prize?
Does it take a particular background?
Does it take a particular kind of story?
Does it take coming from a particular country?

The literary environment in Asaba, the capital city of Delta state was agog on Thursday 30th July 2009, with a new and novel initiative which had just come to town. Like the legendary People of Abame in Chinua Achebe’s famous novel, a new adage had come to the town and the entire place was literally buzzing with a certain literary excitement, the kind of which had not been witnessed since Asaba hosted the Association of Nigerian Authors national convention in the city in 2002...

Success is very busty; it attracts fans and rapists. Because of their fame and weirdness, geniuses are very vulnerable to scandals. People who are gifted at nothing, who contribute nothing to the society, out of jealousy make it their evangelical mission to pull them down...

What Winterbottom and the ignorant Europeans in Arrow of God do to Ezeulu is exactly what some of Soyinka’s Igbo admirers online are doing to him! What part of Arrow of God have they not read? What on earth do they imagine Achebe is saying about the production of otherness?