Two Nigerian Writers Who Teach in the U.S. Win the Windham Campbell Prize

Two novelists from Nigeria who currently teach at U.S. academic institutions have received the 2015 Windham Campbell Prize, that honors authors of fiction, nonfiction, and drama. The prize comes with a $150,000 cash award. The literary awards are administered by Yale University.

Habila_HelonHelon Habila is an associate professor of creative writing at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia. Habila is a contributing editor of the Virginia Quarterly Review. He is the author of three novels: Waiting for an Angel (W.W. Norton, 2003), Measuring Time (Harnish Hamilton, 2007) and Oil on Water (W.W. Norton, 2011).

Habila graduated from the University of Jos, Nigeria, in 1995, with a degree in English Literature. He came to the United States in 2005 as the first Chinua Achebe Fellow at Bard College, New York.

T.ColeTeju Cole is a Distinguished Writer in Residence at Bard College in New York. He is the author of Open City, a novel about a young Nigerian who is conducting his residency in psychiatry in New York.

Cole is a graduate of Kalamazoo College in Michigan and holds a master’s degree from the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London. He studied for a Ph.D. in art history at Columbia University.

Related Articles

Leave a Reply

Get the JBHE Weekly Bulletin

Receive our weekly email newsletter delivered to your inbox

Latest News

Recent Books of Interest to African American Scholars

The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education regularly publishes a list of new books that may be of interest to our readers. The books included are on a wide variety of subjects and present many different points of view.

North Carolina A&T State University Mounts Effort to Educate Heirs Property Owners

Heirs property is land passed down through a family, often over multiple generations and to numerous descendants, without the use of wills or probate courts. In North Carolina, the value of land owned as heirs property is estimated at nearly $1.9 billion. Heirs property is disproportionately held by Black landowners.

Higher Education Grants or Gifts of Interest to African Americans

Here is this week’s news of grants or gifts to historically Black colleges and universities or for programs of particular interest to African Americans in higher education.

New Legislation Aims to Boost Entrepreneurial Efforts of HBCU Students

Congresswoman Nikema Williams (GA-05) has introduced the Minority Entrepreneurship Grant Program Act, bipartisan legislation that creates a grant program with the Small Business Administration for entrepreneurs at minority-serving institutions like historically Black colleges and universities.

Featured Jobs