Award-winning writer and journalist, Abubakar Adam Ibrahim, will be the featured author on May 26 at the Guest Writer Session an initiative of the Abuja Writers’ Forun (AWF) which started in June 2008 and has become the template for similar programmes nationwide. The Guest Writer Session which this year featured Uche Ezechukwu, Steve Okecha, Oyibo Ameh, K K Iloduba and Betty Abah holds by 4pm at Hamdala Plaza, Plot 23, Jimmy Carter Street, off Protea Hotel, Asokoro, Abuja. Abubakar Adam Ibrahim has been fascinated with writing from a much younger age, which was what motivated him to dump the sciences and study Mass Communications at the University of Jos. He has dabbled into poetry and plays but is more at home with prose. He won the BBC African Performance Prize in 2007 and the ANA Plateau/Amatu Braide Prize for Prose the following year. He also emerged runner-up for the ANA Plateau Poetry Prize.He is a fellow of the British Council Radiophonics creative writing workshop and has been selected for the Fidelity Bank CreativeWriting Workshop as well as the Caine Prize for African Writing workshop (2012) – which he could not attend because of the Nigeria-South Africa Yellow fever row.
His radio drama, A Bull Man’s Story which fetched him the BBC African Performance Prize in 2007 was highly commended by the judges for the writer’s ‘ability to enter the minds of his character’. He published his first novel, The Quest for Nina in 2009 with a small publishing outfit in the US and has gone on to feature on several online webzines where his short fictions and essays have been well received locally and internationally. He has been featured in Daughters of Eve and Other New Short Stories from Nigeria published by CCC Press, London in 2010.
His debut collection of short stories, The Whispering Trees, is published in Nigeria by Parresia Publishers, Lagos and has been receiving positive endorsement within the literary community in Nigeria. In the words of poet and activist Odia Ofeimun, Ibrahim has writes “stories that haunt with a telling animist-realist sensibility” and he “ draws on old, intriguing traditions of folklore to thresh new and challenging insight into how we live today.” For A.
Igoni Barrett, “fire and smoke, snapshots of life and brushstrokes of afterlife, the mystical running alongside domestic commonplaces, these are the energetic strains of ” Ibrahim’s debut story collection. While Helon Habila regards Ibrahim as a writer to look out for.
Educated at the University of Jos, Nigeria, where he obtained a degree in Mass Communication ,Abubakar had a stint with the Vanguard newspaper. He is currently the Arts Editor of Abuja based Sunday Trust newspaper.
Since its inception four years ago, the Guest Writer Session has been a consistent feature of the nation’s literary scene. The May 26, 2012 edition will include the usual side attractions of poetry performance, mini art exhibition, and a raffle-draw as well as live music.
The Abuja Writer’s Forum meets three Sundays each month and hosts a reading on every last Saturday at the International Institute of Journalism, Hamdala Plaza, Jimmy Carter Street, Asokoro, Abuja.
