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.

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