Advisory board statement for The Nigeria Prize for Literature 2025
By Akachi Adimora-Ezeigbo
ON behalf of the Advisory Board of the Nigeria Prize for Literature, I welcome you to the 2025 Grand Award Night to celebrate the excellence of Nigerian literature. Nigeria LNG, sponsors of this prestigious prize which is in its 21st year, continues to promote Nigerian writings, criticism, and other engagements related to the literary enterprise. NLNG’s sustenance of the Nigeria Prize for Literature and that of Literary Criticism all these years shows commitment to Nigeria. We thank them for the vision and commitment in promoting this very crucial endeavour.
The 2025 prize is on prose. 252 entries for prose writing and 34 for literary criticism were received. The panel of judges then began the process of adjudication immediately after the press conference of April 15, 2025. The panel meticulously examined all the entries using the approved criteria.
For the Prize for Literary Criticism. Among the entries received, four stood out for fulfilling the basic requirements for submitting entries. In no particular order they are Ekikereobong Aniekean Usoro who submitted: a. The Supernatural and Igbo Cosmology in Chigozie Obioma’s An Orchestra of Minorities; b. Contextualising Male Privileging in Cheluchi Onyemelukwe-Onuobia’s The Son of the House within the African Weltanschauung; and c. ‘All Art is Propaganda’: The Politics of Gender (Mis)Representation in Kuku’s and Ugonna’s Dialogic Narratives.
Okwudiri Anasiudu’s submissions: a. Afropolitan Identity and Afrodiasporic Otherness in Selected African Novels; b. Allegorical Conjectures in Helon Habila’s Measuring Time; and c. Mimetic designs in Helon Habila’s Oil on Water.
Uchechukwu Peter Umezurike entered a. “Omelora”: Orthodox and Disciplinary Masculinities in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Purple Hibiscus; b. “I Choose Life”: Negation, Agency, and Utopian Hope in Tayeb Salih’s Season of Migration to the North; and c. ‘A son who is a man:’ Receptive Masculinity in Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, and Onyeka Ike who submitted, a. Contextualizing the Perspectives of War in Flora Nwapa’s Never Again and Chimamanda Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun; b. Interrogating Enfeebling Syndrome: Corruption and Abuse of Public Office in Chimamanda Adichie’s Trilogy; and c. Old Wine in a New Wineskin: Achebe’s Okonkwo Character Archetype of Adichie’s Eugene Achike.
These published articles in both institutional and professional journal outlets showed great insights into a wide selection of novels. They explored diverse areas of human concerns and deftly interrogated the selected works expounding interpretations and providing novel and concise findings.
Following in depth adjudication of these entries, the panel of judges and the Advisory board have judged the submissions by Okwudiri Anasiudu as the winning paper and worthy of winning the 2025 Nigeria Prize for Literary Criticism.
Oyin Olugbile (middle) receiving her plaque and warm handshake from the MD, NLNG, Dr. Philip Mshelbila on Friday, October 10, 2025 at the grand award night tagged ‘Inspire’ while the Advisory Board Chairperson, Prof. Akachi Adimora-Ezeigbo (right) and other board members, Professors Ahmed Yerima and Olu Obafemi (left) look on… in Lagos
The Prize for Literature: A longlist of 11 was the first public announcement of potential winners on July 23, 2025. This was followed by the shortlist of 3 announced on August 27, 2025. The shortlist in no particular order are This Motherless Land by Nikki May, Sanya by Oyin Olugbile and The Road to the Country by Chigozie Obioma.
This Motherless Land: Nikki May’s This Motherless Land is a 2024 novel published by Narrative Landscape Press, Lagos. It tells the story of a young girl, Funke, who experiences loss, dislocation, and the challenges of belonging to two racially different cultures. The novel captures the intricacies of interracial marriages, reverse racial discrimination, and the challenges of fitting into a society which profiles an individual based on skin tone. May’s novel explores these through the lives of two white British sisters who choose different trajectories in life. One follows her heart by marrying a Nigerian doctor and she relocates to Lagos with him, bears 2 children, has a rewarding teaching career and a loving family. The other chooses to keep up appearances and lives a bitter vengeful life which almost destroys her daughter and significantly affects her biracial niece.
May’s novel contributes to the important dialogue over where home is. It questions parochial mindsets of clinging to same origins/cultures/races. It exposes the psychological implications of wanting to belong and of rejection. Ultimately, the novel shows the power of love, friendship, and resilience in conquering these challenges. It depicts the resilience of the Nigerian to overcome, to find that reason to persevere. Significantly too, is the way May depicts Funke’s reclamation of her stolen heritage in England. This Motherless Land opens many perspectives in the way the society understands relationships that transcend colour, time, and space.
Sanya: Oyin Olugbile’s debut novel Sanya is published by Masobe Books in 2022. The novel is about two siblings Dada and Sanya, the eponymous character who collide in the path of power tussle and conquest. The novel explores a world of fantasy where gods take on human form and cohabit with the people. The siblings are born from one of such god-human forms, Ajoke, who defies the order by coming to earth and staying back. She falls in love and her union with Aganju, an offspring of another deity with whom Ajoke’s type is not to cohabit leads to outcomes of enormous proportions. Ajoke and Aganju’s first offspring Dada is a sickly boy whose chance of survival is uncertain. Ajoke is determined to have another child at all costs, and she succeeds but she loses her life in the process. This second child, Sanya, has been prophesied to be a warrior. Her birth as a female disconcerts her father who had been elated at having an offspring who will be great. Combined with the loss of his beloved wife, the distraught Aganju dies, and Dada and Sanya are left to their mother’s twin sister Abike, who cares for them. Being offsprings of different categories of Orisa’s, both Dada and Sanya possess great but different powers. While Dada is buoyed by Esu who grants him visions and dark powers, Sanya possesses the traits of Sango, fearless, strong, and fiery. They soon go on a path of collision when they attain the thrones of two opposing kingdoms.
Olugbile in this novel reincarnates Sango in the form of a young courageous girl, Sanya. Her protectiveness and valour in confronting injustice earns her the throne of Oluji kingdom. She attains this position masquerading as a man. The society in which the story is set clearly discriminates against a female warrior and has no place for a female king. Olugbile weaves together the spiritual realm with mythical characters who come to earth and carry out great deeds. The strength of this narrative is in the depth of research that must have gone into recreating such a larger-than-life mythical character in a different gender in a period when such was not possible. Olugbile achieves this in clear language which allows readers enter a realm in vivid ways.
The Road to the Country: Published in 2024 by Masobe Books, Chigozie Obioma’s The Road to the Country returns readers to a familiar subject in Nigerian literature, the Biafra War. This is a subject that has preoccupied many writers across generations of Nigerian literature. However, Obioma’s engagement with this subject is in a novel manner, depicting the versatility of Nigerian writers to creatively tell a familiar story in new ways that grip reader’s attention. Obioma tells a story of devastation through multiple timelines. He uses a seer, an element of mysticism, to create a structure for the story to move along different times and spaces.
Kunle, the protagonist, is a first-year university student haunted by the guilt that he caused his younger brother’s accident that left him crippled. When his younger brother impulsively relocates with their neighbour’s family to Biafra just at the start of the war, Kunle feels compelled to go in search of him and bring him home. This act of atonement quickly spirals out of control as he is conscripted into the war to fight on the Biafran side. Despite the devastations of the war which claims many of his compatriots, Kunle survives and brings his brother home. This is at the cost of Agnes, the mother of his child and a future where he battles against the horrors he experienced at the war front.
Obioma’s expert story-telling shows in his ability to weave together a historical narrative with the personal, intimate experiences of persons who encountered the war. We are confronted with the many politics of the war alongside the realities of the victims and other actors in the spectacle. Chigozie Obioma successfully adds to the growing number of civil war narratives with this spellbinding novel.
After the judges’ adjudication of the 252 entries received for the 2025 The Nigeria Prize for Literature, and in consideration of technique, subject matter, thematic depth, and social relevance, the panel of judges and the Advisory Board have found……….Oyin Olugbile’s Sanya as outstanding and worthy of the prize and therefore declare it the winner of the 2025 The Nigeria Prize for Literature!
Thank you, ladies and gentlemen.
* Prof. Adimora-Ezeigbo, academic and writer, is Chairman of the Advisory Board for The Nigeria Prize for Literature and The Nigeria Prize for Literary Criticism
