* Affirms The Theme ‘Change: Imagining Alternatives ‘
All is set for the 2025 Lagos Book & Art Festival (LABAF), which holds from November 10 to 16 at two venues — Freedom Park on Hospital Road (by Broad Street), Lagos Island, and the JRandle Centre for Yoruba Culture and History, at Onikan, Lagos Island.
Only recently, frontline art and culture advocacy organisation, the Committee for Relevant Art (CORA), unveiled plans for the 2025 edition of its flagship project, LABAF.
The theme for the 27th edition of LABAF is: ‘Change: Imagining Alternatives’, stated the Programme Chair of CORA, Jahman Anikulapo, who is equally the festival director.
“Our subject, this year, is primarily inspired by the need to encourage new processes to transform our society into a productive, knowledge economy as we progress through the second, quarter century of the world’s fourth largest democracy. The 62-programme of events during the festival hopes to show several points of light in a dark, pessimistic world headlined by Herdsmen killings, Boko Haram sit-ins, and other convulsions in the polity that unsettle us all. Can we all, through books, imagine a world of better possibilities? LABAF 2025 will be spotlighting novels, non-fiction narratives and dramas in which hope, doggedness, the will to win, is a key subject,” said a statement from the Programmes Directorate, LABAF .
The statement continues: “The focus of the festival remains Literacy Campaign through the instrumentality of the arts in all its dimensions, hence the 62 events that would be held in the course of the one-week duration of the festival will be devoted to using the various disciplines of the arts – literature, visual, performing, media arts, etc – to deepen CORA’s founding objective of educating, enlightening and consequently empowering (3Es) the citizenry to participate in the process of nation building.
“The ultimate aim is to explore the artistic and cultural resources of the nation to help develop its human capital resources for the benefit of the entire society.”
The main features of the book feast are conversations, networking, workshops, mentorships ans children festival. In all, there are going to be 12 plenaries on politics, culture and society, four sessions on Literature in the Digital Age (AI, etc), 10 BookTreks (book chats) on fiction, drama, poetry, nonfiction, two days of Green Festival – November 14 and 15 – two days of Open Mic, two days of poetry competition, two days of CORA Youth Creative Clubs, five visual events/exhibitions, four performances – drama, dance, poetry, etc – four film screenings, two literary parties and others.
“The festival is an open-air, free programme that attracts no gate fees or financial commitment to participants in all the events except to vendors with merchandises,” said Anikulapo, explaining that since its birth in 1999, the festival has been intentional about remaining open-air and free-access because it was “conceived as CORA’s contribution to the spread of literacy towards boosting the capacity of the human resources of the nation, and by extension the African continent, to grow its economic potentialities.”
Of the 62 events featuring in the festival, the CORA only conceived and is running only 60 per cent, the rest 40 per cent are by partner organisations that have remained the pillars of the festival’s sustenance, survival and success in the past 27 years of existence.
Though a largely contributory festival with programming contents by partner organisations, the LABAF is supported in terms of resources by a few corporate institutions, and contributions by/and goodwill of some members of its boards. The core segment of the programme content, the CORA BookTreks, is supported by through grants by the Hawthornden Foundation.
The lead partner is Freedom Park, which in the past 15 years, has provided its vast lush green ambience as the home of the festival; next is the Children and the Environment, CATE, which for 20 years has consistently staged the Green Festival — the children-adolescents segment; and there is the Events by Nature, which in past decade, has anchored the CORA Youth Creative Club, CYCC. The two-year old CORA BookTrekkers anchors the youth literary segment.
Meanwhile, Moonbeam: An Anthology of Short Stories by Nigeria’s foremost culture journalists has hit the book shelf across the country.
Published by one of the innovative independent publishing houses in Nigeria and now in Kenya, Narrative Landscape Press, Moonbeam is a testament to the creative genius of work-a-day culture journalists, who have shown through their works that beyond reporting culture events, they can hold their own creatively any day.
A former Arts Editor of The Guardian and publisher of online arts and culture platform, TheArtHubNg (www.thearthubng.com), Mr. Anote Ajeluorou, is editor of the anthology.
Moonbeam has been hailed as a bold cultural offering by a significant segment of Nigeria’s culture community. Even before the book arrived bookshelf, it had a powerful presence at the Quramo Festival of Words (QFest 2025) early October with a panel on the Place of Anthologies in a Book Ecosystem, with contributors like . Akubuiro, Agbedeh, Uwaezuoke and Omatseye, with the editor, Mr. Ajeluorou moderating.
On Friday, November 14, 2025 @4.00pm, the contributors will be discussing at Lagos Book and Art Festival (LABAF) 2025 at the Freedom Park. The theme of the conversation is ‘Moonbeam: Interrogating the Intersection of Journalism and Creative Storytelling’ as the interesting theme some of the anthology’s contributors will also be speaking to at Lagos Fringe Festival on November 19, 2025 by 11.00am—1.00pm at Esther’s Revenge Lounge.
According to the editor, Ajeluorou, “Moonbeam is a victory for culture reporting in Nigeria, and hopefully, elsewhere, too. Of course, culture reporters are also published novelists, playwrights and poets world wide like those we have here in our midst like Lasisi (Night of My Flight, among others), Kan (The Carnivorous City, among others), Ibrahim (When We Were Fireflies, among others), Omatseye (Juju Eyes, among others), Akubuiro (Yamtarawala: The Warrior King, among others), Ajeluorou (Igho Goes to Farm, among others), and so on. So, there’s nothing new about culture reporters publishing creative works. But to do so in an anthology is new and different. It’s innovative.”
