Helon Habila Ngalabak

Helon Habila Ngalabak

Helon Habila Ngalabak

Professor

Creative Writing: fiction

Helon Habila's current book is The Chibok Girls: The Boko Haram Kidnappings and Islamist Militancy in Nigeria, a nonfiction investigation into the kidnapping of 276 girls in Nigeria by Islamist militants in 2014. His first novel, Waiting for an Angel, has been translated into many langauges including Dutch, Italian, Swedish, and French.  His writing has won many prizes including the Caine Prize, 2001; the Commonweath Writers Prize, Africa region, 2003; the Emily Balch Prize, 2008, and the Windham-Campbell Prize for Fiction, 2015.

He is a contributing editor to the Virginia Quarterly Review.  His second novel, Measuring Time, published in 2007, won the Virginia Library Foundation Fiction Award, 2008, and was shortlisted for the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, 2008.  His third novel, Oil on Water, was published in the U.S. in 2011.  His stories, articles, reviews, and poems have appeared in various magazines and papers including Granta, AGNI, The Virginia Quarterly Review, Guernica, and the London Guardian.  His short story, The Hotel Malogo, was selected for the Best American Non-required Reading Anthology.  Habila is the editor of the Granta Book of African Short Story, 2011.