Described as a fiercely competitive edition of The Nigeria Prize for Literature, the NLNG-sponsored Prize hit a historic high this year, receiving a record-breaking 252 entries. This number exceeds the 2024 total of 163 entries. The 2025 now appears to have been an underestimation of the race’s intensity with two previous winners involved.
Of the 11 titles longlisted this year, six are female writers and five male, setting the stage for what could be described as the ‘beatification of the female writer’.
The prize is sponsored by NLNG and offers a cash award of $100,000 to the author of the winning book at a grand ball event in October. The event commemorates the company’s first LNG loading in October 1999. The prize rotates yearly across four genres: prose fiction, poetry, drama, and children’s literature.
Speaking while unveiling the long list, the Chairman of Advisory Board for the Prize, Professor Akachi Adimora-Ezeigbo, stated that the Advisory Board is excited with the longlist of 11 books that have made it from 252 submitted for the 2025 edition.
She stated that from this stage of the longlist onward, the prize will evoke a mix of emotions both within the stories themselves and in response to the selection of finalists and the eventual winner(s) of the $100,000 prize.
While commending the judges for a thoughtful and rigorous selection, she reiterated the Advisory Board’s commitment to excellence in literature and nurturing a strong reading culture.
On Sunday, August 3, the Committee for Relevant Art (CORA) in collaboration with the NLNG, will stage the 16th edition of the CORA-NPL Book Party at the Lagos Continental Hotel, Victoria Island. The event begins promptly at 1:00pm.
The book soiree, which debuted in 1996 as a special iteration of CORA’s literary activism mission, has evolved into a major platform for celebrating and showcasing the best works longlisted for the yearly Nigeria Prize for Literature.
In a statement by CORA, issued by its programme officer, Samuel Osaze, the remarkable quality of the 2025 entries is reflected in the caliber of writers on this year’s longlist.
He added, “The Book Party represents the first stage of public engagement with the longlisted writers. It is a platform that continues to uphold its essence in bringing the writers’ works under the lens of public discourse and critical engagement. Truly, it’s the year of the heavyweights!”
Why the Book Party
“Since 2010, the CORA has been a critical force in the projection of the longlisted works to the attention of the public. This is through the annual CORA-NPL Book Party. To CORA, the 11 on the longlist are the very best titles and writers in the genre this season. It means that, out of the over 250 entries for this edition, the 11 titles are exceptional, and, any of them could indeed clinch the coveted Prize. The objective of the Book Party as manifested in the past editions is to ensure that we bring the longlisted writers and books face-to-face with the literary audiences, so that we could create conversations around the work and the author. In its 16th edition, the Book Party has become a respectable platform through which the NPL longlisted writers are engaged on their work by the public. This is the core reason we initiated the CORA-NPL Book Party, essentially to celebrate the accomplishment of the author, and celebrate their individual work on the milestone,” stated CORA Programme’s directorate led by Jahman Anikulapo.
The Longlisted Books
When We Were Fireflies by Abubakar Adam Ibrahim
When brooding artist, Yarima Lalo, encounters a moving train for the first time, two serendipitous events occur: First, it triggers memories of past lives in which he was twice murdered — once on a train. He also meets Aziza, a woman with a complicated past of her own, who becomes key to helping him understand what he is experiencing. With a third deth in his current life imminent, together they go hunting for remnants of his past lives. Will they find evidence that he is losing his mind or the people who once loved or loathed him?
PETRICHOR, The Scent Of A New Beginning by Ayo Oyeku
In 1976, young Jola steps into St. Michael’s Anglican Missionary School with dreams of a brighter future — only to stumble into a nightmare. Beneath the warm smile of Reverend Powell, a white missionary principal, lies a monster who wields God’s name to justify unspeakable cruelty. When Jola’s desperate bid for freedom ends in betrayal and a river’s dark embrace, he claws his way back to a mother who will stop at nothing to protect him. But justice slips through their fingers as tragedy strikes, leaving scars that time can’t heal. Decades later, as Nigeria unfurls its democratic wings, in 1999, love finds Jola in the form of Chinelo — tempest of grace vowing to regain his stolen years and get him justice.
The Road To The Country by Chigozie Obioma
Set in Nigeria in the late 1960s, The Road to the Country is the epic story of a shy, bookish student haunted by long-held guilt who must go to war to free himself. When his younger brother disappears as the country explodes in civil war, Kunle must set out on an impossible rescue mission. Kunle’s search for his brother becomes a journey of atonement that will see him conscripted into the breakaway Biafran army and forced to fight a war he hardly understands, all while navigating the prophecies of a local seer, he who marks Kunle as an abami eda — one who will die and return to life. Obioma’s novel is an odyssey of brotherhood, love, and unimaginable courage set during one of the most devastating conflicts in the history of Africa.
The Middle Daughter by Chika Unigwe
When 17-year-old Nani loses her older sister and then her father in quick succession, her world spins off its axis. Isolated and misunderstood by her grieving mother and sister, she’s drawn to an itinerant preacher, a handsome self-proclaimed man of God who offers her a new place to belong. All too soon, Nani finds herself estranged from her family, tethered to her abusive husband by children she loves but cannot fully comprehend. She must find the courage to break free and wrestle her life back — without losing what she loves most.
Water Baby by Chioma Okereke
In Makoko, the floating slum off mainland Lagos, Nigeria, 19-year-old Baby yearns for an existence where she can escape the future her father has planned for her. With opportunities scarce, Baby jumps at the chance to join a newly launched drone-mapping project, aimed at broadening the visibility of her community. Then a video of her at work goes viral and Baby finds herself with options she could never have imagined — including the possibility of leaving her birthplace to represent Makoko on the world stage. But will life beyond the lagoon be everything she’s dreamed of? Or has everything she wants been in front of her all along? It is a coming-of-age story based on the real settlement of Makoko in Nigeria.
Fine Dreams by Linda N. Masi
Set in a fictional town, at a fictional school, Fine Dreams centres on four young friends, the stars of their school’s track team. While studying for examination, they are kidnapped and taken to a terrorist encampment. Two are claimed as “wives” by their captors, one is forced to wear a suicide vest, and each is subjected to appalling violence and terror. While their stories resonate with a widely publicised 2014 abduction, these four young women could have been taken in any of the many incidents that have plagued the Nigerian people for years. Even though they are abducted and abused by men in power and forced to survive in a dark place, these resilient young women recover their dreams and hopes to live in daylight once again.
Leave My Bones in Saskatoon by Michael Afenfia
Seen through the eyes of Owoicho, a television presenter seeking a better life for himself and his family, Leave my Bones in Saskatoon spans two cultures and continents. The story begins with Owoicho’s good news. He can’t wait to tell his family that their permanent residency application to Canada was successful. But while he was in Abuja, happy about this breakthrough, somewhere in the outskirts of Makurdi, a dark and troubling event threatens to torpedoe all the plans he and his wife, Ene had of moving their family to Saskatoon. We also meet Ochanya, Owoicho’s teenage daughter who has to deal with the twin shock of losing close family and the unavoidable transition from girl to adolescence that pitches her against the people that love and care for her the most. With everything Owoicho and Ochanya have to deal with, do they still make it out to Canada as planned and whose bones are in Saskatoon?
This Motherless Land by Nikki May
Split between England and Nigeria, two extraordinary cousins are set on vastly different paths as they come to terms with their shared family history. Quiet Funke is happy in Lagos. She loves her art teacher mother, her professor father, and even her annoying little brother (most of the time). But when tragedy strikes, she’s sent to England, a place she knows only from her mother’s stories.
To her dismay, she finds the much-lauded estate dilapidated, the food tasteless, the weather grey. Worse still, her mother’s family is cold and distant. With one exception: her cousin Liv. Free-spirited Liv has always wanted to break free of her joyless family. She becomes fiercely protective of her little cousin, and her warmth and kindness give Funke a place to heal. The two girls grow into adulthood the closest of friends. But the choices their mothers made haunt Funke and Liv and when a second tragedy occurs their friendship is torn apart.
Sanya by Oyin Olugbile
Sànyà always felt different. And everyone that knew her — the people in the village she grew up in, her beloved brother, Dada, her Aunt Abike, and even her parents before she was born—knew that there was something special about her, too. After an unspeakable tragedy causes her to leave home and grow up too soon, she is devastated to find that her incredible powers are linked to a future which she must fight, even at the cost of her very soul. She begins life anew, hoping that the dark prophesy would somehow rewrite itself. Soon, however, her carefully crafted life and identity becomes the catalyst for a deadly war that will tear her family apart, and doom everything she holds dear.
New York, My Village by Uwem Apan
From a suspiciously cheap Hell’s Kitchen walk-up, Nigerian editor and winner of a Toni Morrison Publishing Fellowship, Ekong Udousoro, is about to begin the opportunity of a lifetime to learn the ins and outs of the publishing industry from its incandescent epicentre. While his sophisticated colleagues meet him with kindness and hospitality, he is soon exposed to a colder, ruthlessly commercial underbelly —callous agents, greedy landlords, boorish and hostile neighbours; and, beneath a superficial cosmopolitanism, a bedrock of white cultural superiority and racist assumptions about Africa, its peoples, and worst of all, its food. Reckoning, at the same time, with the recent history of the devastating and brutal Biafran War, in which Ekong’s people were a minority of a minority caught up in the mutual slaughter of majority tribes, Ekong’s life in New York becomes a saga of unanticipated strife.
An Unusual Grief by Yewande Omotoso
How do you get to know your daughter when she is dead? This is the question that haunts Mojisola as she grapples with the sudden loss of her daughter, Yinka and the unresolved fractures in their relationship. She is forced to confront the dysfunctions of her life that have led her to this point, evading her errant husband and mourning their estranged daughter alone. Mojisola’s grief takes her from Cape Town to Johannesburg where she holes up in Yinka’s apartment, unearthing the life that she had built for herself there. Walking a mile in Yinka’s shoes, Mojisola slips into a clandestine underworld, where she learns to break free from the bondage of the labels, wife and mother. In this new world of feline companionship, reignited talents and unlikely friendships with Yinka’s acerbic landlady Zelda, Mojisola’s understanding of life and her place within it, is built anew.
