2 weeks ago
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Nigerian writer, Olakunle Ologunro, has been awarded the prestigious $57,000 Olive B. O’Connor Fellowship successful Fiction astatine Colgate University. The yearly fellowship is 1 of the highly rated originative penning fellowships successful the U.S., wherever lone 2 writers are selected for the grant each year. Ologunro is 1 of the 2 recipients for the 2025-2026 session.
The fellowship is “designed to enactment writers completing their archetypal books. It provides a generous stipend, bureau space, and an intelligence assemblage for the recipients, who walk 1 world twelvemonth astatine Colgate. In return, each chap teaches 1 multigenre originative penning store per semester and gives a nationalist speechmaking of their work.”
Before Ologunro, lone a fewer Nigerian writers had been awarded the fellowship, including Chinelo Okparanta (2012-2013), Gbenga Adesina (2019-2020), and Ajibola Tolase (2023-2024).
Olakunle Ologunro received his MFA successful originative penning from Johns Hopkins University, wherever his story, “Besties,” was named an honourable notation for the 2024 Benjamin T. Sankey fellowship. The judge, Asali Solomon, describes his enactment arsenic “tragic and comic successful adjacent measure, with effortlessly drawn analyzable and implicit characters.”
Olakunle’s penning has been awarded an Elizabeth George Foundation grant, a Tennessee Williams Scholarship for the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, a Juniper Summer Workshop Scholarship, and nominated for a Pushcart prize. His enactment has besides received enactment from the Virginia Centre for the Creative Arts (VCCA), Vermont Studio Centre, and Aspen Words, wherever helium was named a 2025 Emerging Writer Fellow successful Fiction.
His fabrication appears oregon is forthcoming successful Story Magazine, Lolwe, the Queer Africa anthology, the Feel Good anthology, the New England Review, and elsewhere. He won the inaugural Kreative Diadem Prize, was a finalist for the 2017 Awele Creative Trust Award, the Gerald Kraak Award for enactment that provokes thought connected the topics of gender, societal justness and sexuality, and the Adina Talve-Goodman Fellowship from One Story Magazine. He was besides longlisted for the 2024 Commonwealth Prize and the Miles Morland penning scholarship.
Olakunle is an alumnus of the 2016 Farafina Trust Creative Writing Workshop facilitated by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, and is an alumnus of the EbonyLife Creative Academy (ELCA), wherever helium studied The Art of Screenwriting. Ha has written for TV, with penning credits successful AfricaMagic telenovelas specified arsenic Venge, Itura (2024 victor of the AMVCA Best Scripted Series), and Tinsel, Nigeria’s longest-running TV series.
Congratulations, Olakunle Ologunro. We can’t hold to work the enactment you make passim the fellowship!
English (US) ·