ANA ABUJA HOSTS NDUKA OTIONO

The immediate past Secretary-General of the association of Nigerian author, Nduka Otiono, will on Thursday 2nd of July 2009 be Guest of the Association of Nigeria Authors (Abuja Chapter) 's much sort after Special Guest Reading session.

Nduka Otiono, writer, scholar, and journalist, is Izaak Walton Killam Scholar in the Department of English and Film Studies, University of Alberta, Edmonton, Canada, and Fellow, William Joiner Centre for War and Social Consequences, University of Massachusetts Boston, USA. Born in Kano city, Nigeria, he holds a Master's degree in English from the University of Ibadan, Nigeria, where he has been an Associate Lecturer in the Department of English. He was for four years the General Secretary, the writers’ guild of Nigeria called the Association of Nigerian Authors (ANA). A cultural activist, he has served as founding member, Advisory Board of the Nigeria Prize for Literature; Chairman, Publicity Committee of the Nigeria International Book Fair; member, National Committee on UNESCO’s Intangible Cultural Heritage. A fellow of the British Council Cambridge Seminar, Otiono has also been a grantee of the US Department of State’s International Visitor programme, the French Embassy in Nigeria, and Goethe Institut also in Nigeria. His first book, The Night Hides with a Knife, jointly won the maiden ANA/Spectrum Prize for fiction, while his second, Voices in the Rainbow (Poems), was runner up for the ANA/Cadbury Poetry Prize in 1997. The third, We-Men: An Anthology of Men Writing on Women, which he co-edited with E.C. Osondu, a Writing Fellow at Syracuse University, USA, was hailed by The News magazine as “subject of the greatest controversy in Nigerian literature.” Otiono is also co-editor of Camouflage: Best of Contemporary Writing from Nigeria (Short stories) (2006).

A widely travelled intellectual, Otiono has been an Associate Researcher for the Chinua Achebe Foundation, and was founding Editor of The Post Express Literary Supplement (PELS), which won Lit­erary Column of the Year 1997 and the first ANA Merit Award in 1998. Before consulting as Literary Editor for NewAge, Otiono was on the Editorial Board of THISDAY newspapers.

Otiono’s second collection of poems, Love in a Time of Nightmares, was recently published in the US. He is currently co-editing two books on oral literature in Africa: Beyond Text: Issues in African Oral Literature and Diaspora Studies dedicated to Isidore Okpewho at 70, and Azania Speaks: Spoken Word and Visions of Partnership in Postcolonial Africa.

Most recent awards include: Izaak Walton Killam Memorial Scholarship, the most prestigious graduate studies award at the University of Alberta, Canada.

Academic Distinctions

• Izaak Walton Killam Memorial Scholarship, April 2009
• William Rea Scholarship, Spring 2009
• Sarah Nettie Christie Research Award, May 2009
• Andrew Stewart Memorial Graduate Prize for Research, University of Alberta, Edmonton, Canada (2008).
• University nominee, Trudeau Scholarship, University of Alberta, Edmonton, Canada (2007).
• FS Chia Doctoral Scholarship, August 2006

The reading which will commence at 4pm will take place at the Shehu musa Yar'adua Centre library. Some notable literary characters who have appeared on the ANA Abuja Special Guest Reading Session include Kudo Eresia-Eke, Bello Musa Dankano, Odoh Diego Okenyodo, Professor Tunde Adeniran, Dr. Dull Johnson, Denja Abdullahi and Amatoritsero Ede amongst others.