Sule Egya Wins 2013 Commonwealth Book Prize For Africa

By Wale Adex

Nigerian academic Dr Sule Emmanuel Egya, who writes poetry and fiction under the pen name E.E Sule, has won this year’s Commonwealth Book Prize for Africa. His first novel, Sterile Sky, published by Pearson Education in the African Writers Series in 2012, was adjudged best by the Commonwealth Prize panel.

Dr Egya has taught at Nasarawa State University and the University of Abuja and is currently an associate professor of English at Ibrahim Badamasi Babangida University, Lapai. Besides poems and short stories published in numerous anthologies, literary magazines and journals, he has published three poetry volumes namely What the Sea Told Me (winner of the 2009 ANA Gabriel Okara Prize), Unclad Sun, and Knifing Tongues.

Sterile Sky is a story of a gifted young Murtala who grew in Kano where violent riots exacerbated by his family’s own woes threaten to erase all he holds dear. Stalked by monsters, real and imagined, desperate to preserve a sense of self and the future, Murtala hunts for answers in the wreckage of the city and the book gives us a unique insight into modern life in northern Nigeria.