Literary Lighting Rod
CHUX OHAI
Since he traveled to Canada in August 2006 as an FS Chia Doctoral Fellow in the Department of English and Film Studies, University of Alberta, Edmonton, Nduka Otiono, Nigerian writer, scholar, literary journalist and activist, has remained in the news for his work. Within six months of arriving Edmonton, Otiono had made strong enough impact in the new community that he was featured on CJSR, a community radio, as a Special Guest; nominated as Guest Writer at the respected Olive Reading series; had his new collection of poems, Love in a Time of Nightmares accepted for publication by a US publisher, and offered a prestigious fellowship by the William Joiner Centre at the University of Massachusetts Boston, with funding from the US Department of State.
The fellowship requires Otiono, and three other fellows from Vietnam and Ireland to participate in a three-month residency at the Joiner Centre during which according to the administrators, “they will meet with writers, editors, journalists, filmmakers, critics, representatives from writers organizations and programs, community leaders, publishers and university scholars. They will also participate in a three-week U.S. study tour.” The fellowship, the officials add, “is aimed at exposing the participants to “a variety of viewpoints and ideas on social and political conflict and to provide participants with an opportunity to pursue research and writing projects.”
Nduka Otiono with Julia Wright,
daughter of Richard Wright
As cultural activist, Otiono 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 beneficiary of the US Department of State’s International Visitor program, as well as a Grantee of the French Embassy and Goethe Institute in Nigeria. His first book, The Night Hides with a Knife (Short stories), 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 (2006). He 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 New Age, Otiono was on the Editorial Board of THISDAY newspapers. Notable in recent time for his exceptional defense of outstanding members of his generation of Nigerian writers – especially those who either have not been ‘fortunate’ enough to jet out of the country on self-imposed exile, or were too proud to seek a better literary climate abroad – Nduka Otiono surprised many of his contemporaries by jetting out to Canada. But in a recent interview with the Editor of Sentinel Online Poetry magazine, Amatoritsero Ede, he assured that he is not exiled in that country. “I would like to be emphatic here,” he is quoted as saying, “I’M NOT IN EXILE. I am on a research trip from Nigeria, having been awarded an FS Chia Doctoral Fellowship/ Teaching Assistantship. At the end of the programme, I would consider wider options.”