Helon Habila

Helon Habila
Helon Habila, Gothenburg 2010
Born	November 1967 Kaltungo, Gombe State, Nigeria
Citizenship	Nigerian
Alma mater	University of Jos University of East Anglia
Notable awards	2001 Caine Prize
Website
www.helonhabila.com

Helon Habila Ngalabak (born November 1967) is a Nigerian novelist and poet, whose writing has won many prizes, including the Caine Prize in 2001. He worked as a lecturer and journalist in Nigeria before moving in 2002 to England, where he was a Chevening Scholar at the University of East Anglia, and he now teaches creative writing at George Mason University, Washington, D.C.

Helon Habila was born in Kaltungo, Gombe State, Nigeria. He studied English Language and Literature at the University of Jos and lectured for three years at the Federal Polytechnic, Bauchi. In 1999 he went to Lagos to write for Hints magazine, moving on to Vanguard newspaper as Literary Editor.

Habila won the Music Society of Nigeria (MUSON) national poetry award for his poem "Another Age" in 2000, the same year his short story collection Prison Stories was published. He won the 2001 Caine Prize for a story from that collection entitled "Love Poems". His first novel, Waiting for an Angel, was published in 2002, and the following year won the Commonwealth Writers' Prize (Africa Region, Best First Book).

Moving to England in 2002, Habila became the African Writing Fellow at the University of East Anglia. In 2005 he was invited by Chinua Achebe to become the first Chinua Achebe Fellow at Bard College, NY, where he spent a year writing and teaching, remaining in the US after the fellowship in America as a professor of Creative Writing at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia.

In 2006 he co-edited the British Council anthology New Writing 14. His second novel, Measuring Time, published in 2007, was nominated for the Hurston-Wright Legacy Award, the IMPAC Prize, and in 2008 won the Virginia Library Foundation Prize for fiction. His third novel, Oil on Water, which deals with environmental pollution in the oil-rich Nigerian Delta, was published in 2010, being shortlisted for prizes including the Pen/Open Book Award, Commonwealth Best Book, Africa Region, and the Orion Book Award. His anthology The Granta Book of the African Short Story came out in September 2011.