The Committee for Relevant Art (CORA) has announced details for the 2025 edition of its flagship event, the Lagos Book & Art Festival (LABAF), scheduled to hold from November 10 to 16 at Freedom Park and the J. Randle Centre for Yoruba Culture and History, both on Lagos Island.
The theme for the 27th edition of the festival is “Change: Imagining Alternatives.”
According to CORA’s Programme Chair and festival director, Jahman Anikulapo, this year’s focus is on inspiring new ways to transform Nigeria into a productive, knowledge-driven society.
“Our subject this year is primarily inspired by the need to encourage new processes to transform our society into a productive, knowledge economy as we progress through the second, quarter century of the world’s fourth largest democracy,” said a statement from the LABAF Programme Directorate.
“The 62-programme of events during the festival hopes to show several points of light in a dark, pessimistic world headlined by herdsmen killings, Boko Haram sit-ins, and other convulsions in the polity that unsettle us all. Can we all, through books, imagine a world of better possibilities? LABAF 2025 will be spotlighting novels, non-fiction narratives and dramas in which hope, doggedness, and the will to win are key subjects,” the statement added.
CORA noted that this year’s festival will sustain its core focus of promoting literacy through art. “The focus of the festival remains literacy campaign through the instrumentality of the arts in all its dimensions, hence the 62 events that would be held in the course of the one-week duration of the festival will be devoted to using the various disciplines of the arts – literature, visual, performing, media arts, etc – to deepen CORA’s founding objective of educating, enlightening and consequently empowering (3Es) the citizenry to participate in the process of nation building.”
The festival, which has remained open-air and free since its inception in 1999, attracts participants from across the creative industry.
“The festival is an open-air, free programme that attracts no gate fees or financial commitment to participants in all the events except to vendors with merchandises,” Anikulapo explained, noting that LABAF was conceived as CORA’s contribution to boosting literacy and human capacity in Nigeria and Africa.
Of the 62 events, 60 percent are organised by CORA, while 40 percent are hosted by partner organisations such as Freedom Park, Children and the Environment (CATE), Events by Nature and CORA BookTrekkers.
Other partners include the Association of Nigerian Authors (ANA), Poets, Essayists and Novelists (PEN), National Association of Nigerian Theatre Arts Practitioners (NANTAP), Society of Nigerian Artists (SNA), Society of Nigerian Theatre Artists (SONTA) and Pan African Writers Association (PAWA).
The festival’s operations are driven mainly by the CORA Volunteers Corps, a team of young graduates and undergraduates supervised by a board of trustees chaired by poet and businessman Kayode Aderinokun, with CORA founder Toyin Akinosho serving as Secretary-General.
LABAF 2025 will feature 12 plenary sessions on politics, culture, and society; workshops; mentorships; 10 book chats; two days of poetry competitions; performances in drama, dance and poetry; visual exhibitions; film screenings; and literary parties.
Since its establishment in 1999, LABAF has been a seven-day “feast of ideas and life” aimed at deepening literacy through education, enlightenment, and empowerment.
