The Booker Prize is awarded each year for the best novel written in English and published in the United Kingdom or Ireland.
For the prize, authors are nominated for their excellence and their commitment to promote art and literature.
From inception, only novels written by Commonwealth, Irish, and South African (and later Zimbabwean) citizens were eligible to receive the prize, but in 2014, it was widened to any English-language novel.
Below, eelive.ng highlights Nigerian novelists that have been nominated for the prestigious literally award:
Ben Okri
Ben Okri is a Nigerian poet and novelist. He is considered one of the foremost African authors in the post-modern and post-colonial traditions.
Okri published his first novel, Flowers and Shadows in 1980, after which he rose to international acclaim.
Since he debuted his career as an author, he has published quite a number of novels, including –The Famished Road, which won him the 1991 Booker Prize for literature.
The Famished Road follows Azaro, an abiku or spirit child, living in an unnamed African, most likely Nigerian, city. The novel employs a unique narrative style incorporating the spirit world with the “real” world in what some have classified as Animist Realism. The book exploits the belief in the coexistence of the spiritual and material worlds that is a defining aspect of traditional African life.
Chinua Achebe
Chinua Achebe was a Nigerian novelist, poet, professor, and critic. His novel, Things Fall Apart (1958), often considered his masterpiece, is the most widely read book in modern African literature. Achebe was finalist for the 1987 Booker prize for fiction for his novel, Anthills of the Savannah, first published in the United Kingdom in 1987.
In Anthills of the Savannah, Achebe condemned political corruption in post-colonial Africa.
Chimamanda Adichie
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is a Nigerian writer whose works range from novels to short stories, to nonfiction. She was described in The Times Literary Supplement as “the most prominent of a procession of critically acclaimed young anglophone authors [which] is succeeding in attracting a new generation of readers to African literature”, particularly in her second home, the United States.
Purple Hibiscus, Adichie’s debut novel first published by Algonquin in 2003, was listed for the 2004 Booker prize.
Chigozie Obioma
Chigozie Obioma is a Nigerian writer. In a review by The New York Times, he was called “the heir to Chinua Achebe”. In 2015, Obioma was named one of “100 Global Thinkers” by Foreign Policy magazine.
He is best known for writing the novels –The Fishermen (2015) and An Orchestra of Minorities (2019), both of which were shortlisted for the Booker Prize in their respective years of publication.
The Fishermen, Obioma debut novel, tells the story of four brothers in a quiet neighbourhood of a Nigerian town, who are given a violent prophecy that shakes their family to the core. It is set in the 1990s, during the regime of Sani Abacha, a military Nigerian leader.
Written by Olusola Oluwatobi
