“What is the point of art but to resist?"
"To resist what?"
"Just to resist, period. On principle.”
Travelers, Helon Habila
Helon Habila is the author of Waiting for an Angel, Measuring Time, Oil on Water and Travelers, a winner of the Caine Prize and the Windham-Campbell Prize, and Professor of Creative Writing at George Mason University.
A Nigerian doctoral student follows his American wife to Berlin for her art fellowship, and falls in with Africans who have crossed deserts and seas to reach Europe. In six linked movements, Travelers tells of displacement, resilience and the search for home.
“This is the answer to the question of what contemporary fiction can do.”Edward Docx, The Guardian
“This is the answer to the question of what contemporary fiction can do.”
Edward Docx, The Guardian, on Travelers
“You must take a year off, one of these days, before you’re old and tired and weighed down by responsibility. Go away somewhere, and read. Read all the important books. Educate yourself, then you’ll see the world in a different way.”
His story “Love Poems” won the Caine Prize in 2001, and his first novel followed a year later. Since then his fiction has carried readers from Lagos under military rule to the Niger Delta and the migrant routes of Europe. He divides his time between Nigeria and the United States.
