Helon Habila
Helon Habila Ngalabak (* November 1967 in Kaltungo, today Gombe State, Nigeria ) is a writer, poet and professor of literature.
Life
Helon Habila grew up with seven siblings in a Christian family in Nigeria, has been spoken in the Tangale. In Gombe, he attended elementary school. At the University of Jos he graduated in 1995 with a bachelor's degree in English literature from. Later, he was a lecturer at the Federal Polytechnic Bauchi, afterwards he moved to Lagos in 1999, where he worked as a literary journalist.
As early as 1992 he published the short story Embrace of the Snake and 1997, a biography of the chief May Kaltungo. Other short stories he published in 2000 as Prison Stories. For the short story Love Poems, he received the Caine Prize for African Writing. At the award ceremony, he traveled for the first time abroad.
His first novel, Waiting for an Angel (2003) tells the story of a writer who is locked up in Nigeria in the 1990s to jail. Measuring Time ( 2007) is a novel about a family in a Nigerian village. Was released in 2010 oil on water, an environmental crime and political thriller that deals with the oil spill in the Niger Delta.
Several African authors influenced his literary work. These include Chinua Achebe and Wole Soyinka (both Nigeria), Ngugi wa Thiongo (Kenya) and Bessie Head ( Botswana ).
Helon Habila lives with his family in Fairfax (USA). He teaches creative writing at George Mason University.
Works
- Waiting for an Angel: A Novel, 2004.
- New Writing 14, 2006.
- Measuring Time: A Novel, 2007.
- Dreams, Miracles, and Jazz: An Anthology of New Fiction Africa, 2007.
- Oil on Water: A Novel, 2010 (oil on water from the English by Thomas Brückner Wunderhorn Publishing House, 2012, ISBN 9783884233917. . ).
- The Granta Book of the African Short Story, 2011.
Awards
- 2001 Caine Prize, Love Poems
- 2003 Commonwealth Writers' Prize, Africa category, Waiting for an Angel
- 2011 Commonwealth Writers' Prize, shortlist, Oil on Water
- 2012 The Time, The 10 Best Thriller 2012 ( 2nd place) for oil on water
- 2013 German Thriller Prize (2nd place International Crime) for oil on water