The 2024 Abebi Award in AfroNonfiction
It is with great delight that we announce The 2024 Abebi Award in Afro-Nonfiction. Following our successful debut last year, we remain assured that the work of TAANI and this Award is much needed and urgent on the literary landscape of the Continent. We received almost ninety applications last year, and we look forward to reading even more exciting and riveting pieces of work from Nigerian women in this year’s edition.
A winner will be announced in the second week of December 2024, along with a runner up and three notable entries.
The winner will be awarded N200,000 and the first runner up will be awarded N120,000. Each notable entry will receive N50,000.
The winner, runner up and three notable entries will be invited to a two-day all expense paid writer’s residency in Lagos, in December. The residency will close with an award ceremony followed by a reading event to celebrate the winning writers. Further details will be released closer to the aforementioned time.
If you have any questions, kindly reach out to us via email at abebiaward@gmail.com.
The award is open to Nigerian women, 18 and above who were born in, grew up in, or have significant lived experience within and proximity to the country. We encourage entries from queer women.
The award is open to writers who have not published a complete body of work (such as a memoir or a novel through a publishing house), and will not have done so by December 2024.
All entries should be creative nonfiction: i.e. real life stories derived from true events from the writer’s life. We are not looking for academic, scholarly or purely journalistic pieces of work. We believe in the revolutionary power of personal narrative and so we would love to read essays that delve deep into emotional interiorities, family relations, gendered expectations, patriarchal conditioning and triumph. This does not mean essays must be sad, or political but that they depict the complexities of what it is to move as a woman in this country/continent. You can see last year's winning entries for model examples of the kind of work we're looking for
All entries should be within the range of 1,500–3,000 words in length
Submissions should be made through the link found here.
Submissions will open from the 1st of October 2024 at 9am WAT and close on the 1st of November 2024 at 6pm WAT.
SUBMISSION GUIDELINES
NOTE TO APPLICANTS
Meet the Judges
Our panel of judges comprises of excellent women, writing and editing powerful stories. Women whose eyes know a good thing, and whose hands are skilled enough to shape a good thing,
Àjọkẹ́ Bọ́dúndé
Àjọkẹ́ Bọ́dúndé is a Nigerian writer and editor. Her work draws from the well of Yoruba tradition, rooted in vibrant celebration of womanhood as whole and powerful. In 2017, her poem ‘Girl’ was published in AKÉ REVIEW. In 2019, she was shortlisted for the Merky New Writers’ Prize, founded by Black British artist Stormzy and Penguin Random House. She is a part of the inaugural BORN::FREE writer’s collective in London, UK. In recent times, she has begun working on her debut collection of poems, as well as long form narrative threading through familial experiences to give prose to the realities of young women navigating personhood and notions of freedom in cultures where autonomy is taboo.
Ope Adedeji
Ope Adedeji is is an editor and writer with almost a decade of experience in media, tech and publishing. She has recently completed her Miles Morland Scholarship, which she was awarded for her novel, the Making of Gods. In 2021, she completed an MA at the University of East Anglia, where she was a Booker Prize Scholar. She has won several literary awards for her writing, and maintains a Substack on the art and science of writing and editing at https://ope.substack.com/. You’ll find her work in McSweeney’s Quarterly, Inque Magazine and The Republic.
Mofiyinfoluwa O.
Mofiyinfoluwa O. is a writer born in Lagos, Nigeria, passionate about the revolutionary power of personal narrative. Her work draws from the lived experiences of women, the intricacies of the self, the complexities of embodiment and the unrelenting power of memory. Her work has been published in Guernica, Pleiades, Ploughshares, The Black Warrior Review, The Other Side of Hope, Variant Lit and elsewhere. Her essay Do We Choose Death? was selected as a Notable Essay in The Best American Essays 2023. She is a final year candidate at The University of Iowa’s Nonfiction MFA where she has received multiple awards such as The Iowa Arts Fellowship, The Magdalena Award and The Stanley Award for International Research. She is currently The Non-Fiction Editor of The Iowa Review and The Founder of The Abebi AfroNonfiction Institute.