Helon Habila

Helon Habila was born in Nigeria. He is a Professor of Creative Writing at George Mason University in Virginia, USA. He studied at the University of Jos in Nigeria, and the University of East Anglia, UK. He is the author of four novels: Waiting for an Angel (2002), Measuring Time (2007), Oil on Water (2010) a genre-mixing environmental literary thriller, which has become an international bestseller, and the latest, Travellers (2019), about home and displacement and the fortunes of African migrants in Europe.Habila’s nonfiction book, The Chibok Girls (2016) investigates the rise of Islamist militancy in Nigeria and the kidnapping of 279 school girls by the Islamist terrorist group, Boko Haram. Helon Habila edited The Granta Book of The African Short Story (2010), and the British Council anthology, NW14: The Anthology of New Writing (2006) which he co-edited with British author Lavinia Greenlaw.His other anthologies are Dreams Miracles and Jazz (2006), co-edited with Khadija George, and Dreams at Dawn (2012), comprising of short stories from writing workshops he conducted in Nigeria between 2010-2013 with Zimbabwean writer Tsitsi Dangaremga and Canadian writer Madeleine Thien.Habila’s writings have won many honors and awards. He won the Musical Society of Nigeria (MUSON) poetry award with his poems, “Another Age” and “Lagos”. His short story, “Love Poems”, received the prestigious Caine Prize for African Writing in 2001. Waiting for an Angel won the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best First Book (Africa Region). He was awarded The Emily Balch prize for his short story, The Hotel Malogo in 2008; Measuring Time was nominated for the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, the Dublin IMPAC Prize, and it won the Virginia Library Foundation Prize for fiction in 2008. Oil on Water was nominated for many awards including the Pen/Open Book Award (shortlist, 2013), Commonwealth Best Book, Africa Region (Shortlist, 2012), and the Orion Book Award (shortlist, 2013). In 2015 Helon Habila received the Windham-Campbell prize for Fiction, awarded by Yale University. The critically acclaimed Travellers was shortlisted for the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction, 2019, and the Grand Prix of Literary Associations, 2019.Habila is on the board of Africa Writers Trust, an organization to promote African writers and writing. Habila has been a contributing editor to the Virginia Quarterly Review since 2004. His essays, articles, reviews and short stories have appeared in Granta, VQR, the UK Guardian, The New York Times, the New York Review of Books, the Wall Street Journal, AGNI, Guernica, Transition, Reportagen, among many others. Habila’s books have been translated into many languages.In 2013, Habila was a DAAD Fellow in Berlin, Germany.In 2024, Helon Habila is Curator in Residence at the international literature festival berlin.Habila divides his time between his native Nigeria and the USA where he lives with his family.