Biography

Helon Habila was born in Nigeria. He teaches creative writing at George Mason University in Virginia.

His short story “Love Poems” received the prestigious Caine Prize for African Writing in 2001. His first novel, Waiting for an Angel, came out in 2002. It went on to win the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize Best First Book (Africa Region). After winning the Caine Prize, Habila was invited to be the first African Writing Fellow at the University of East Anglia, where he stayed as a Chevening Scholar, and later as a PhD Candidate, from 2002–2007. In 2005 Habila was invited by Chinua Achebe to become the first Chinua Achebe Fellow at Bard College, New York. He spent a year writing and teaching at Bard, and after his fellowship, Habila stayed on in America as a professor of Creative Writing at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia.

Habila’s second novel, Measuring Time, came out in 2007. It was nominated for the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award and the Dublin IMPAC Prize, and it won the Virginia Library Foundation Prize for fiction, 2008. In 2010 Habila published Oil on Water, a genre-mixing environmental literary thriller, which has become an international bestseller. Oil on Water was nominated for many awards including the PEN/Open Book Award (shortlist, 2013); Commonwealth Best Book, Africa Region (shortlist, 2012); and the Orion Book Award (shortlist, 2013). In 2015 Helon Habila received the Windham-Campbell Prize for Fiction, awarded by Yale University.

Habila’s most current novel, Travelers (2019), is an account of African migrants in search of home in Europe. Travelers has received critical acclaim and been shortlisted for the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction, and the Grand Prix of Literary Associations. Apart from his novels, Habila has edited several anthologies including the British Council’s New Writing 14 (2005), Dreams, Miracles and Jazz (2006), and The Granta Book of the African Short Story (2011). Habila’s nonfiction book, The Chibok Girls (2016), investigates the rise of Islamist militancy in Nigeria culminating in the kidnapping of the Chibok schoolgirls by Boko Haram.

Habila is also on the board of Africa Writers Trust, an organization to promote African writers and writing. Habila has been a contributing editor to the Virginia Quarterly Review since 2004. His essays, articles, reviews and short stories have appeared in Granta, the UK Guardian, The New York Times, the New York Review of Books, the Wall Street Journal, AGNI, Guernica, Transition, Reportagen, among many others. From 2010–2013 Habila coordinated and facilitated the Fidelity Bank Writers Workshop in Nigeria, and has edited an anthology of stories generated by the workshop participants, titled Dreams at Dawn (2012).

Habila’s books have been translated into many languages.

From July 2013 to June 2014 Habila was a DAAD Fellow in Berlin, Germany. In spring 2023 Habila was a fellow at the Hawthornden Residency in Lake Como, Italy.

Habila divides his time between his native Nigeria and the USA where he lives with his family.