Chairperson of the Advisory Board for the Nigeria Prize for Literature, Professor Akachi Adimora-Ezeigbo, has said that Nigeria LNG Limited does not take back the $100,000 prize money when no winner emerges.
She spoke on Monday in Lagos during the formal handover of 223 entries submitted for this year’s prize. Members of the Advisory Board and the panel of judges received the entries for assessment.
Akachi explained that instead of returning the prize money, NLNG uses it to fund training programmes and workshops for writers.
She recalled a past workshop involving UK based children’s literature expert Kim Reynolds, who worked with selected writers in a training programme.
She said, “ And again, Professor Reynolds, a very well-known children’s literature expert in the UK, was here. With another one person, another woman from the UK, also a children’s teacher. And she organized a very good children’s workshop for a group of 20 writers. Those people whose works were good enough but still no winner. 20 of them. And believe it or not, the next cycle, one of them won the prize. Jude Idada , you may know him. Boom, boom, that’s it. I encourage you to read that book, or if you have any children, or brothers and sisters who are children, recommend the book to them. Boom, boom, it’s a very good novel. That’s what won. And Jude, confessed publicly that he gained a lot from the workshop organized in 2015. That he won it in 2019. So the money is not thrown away.
“NLNG does not withdraw the money, NLNG wants that money to be useful. If a winner does not emerge, NLNG has a way of using that money to organize something.”
She added that NLNG has also supported similar workshops in collaboration with the Nigerian Academy of Letters and Association of Nigerian Authors to train emerging writers across different genres.
Akachi, who won the prize in 2007 in the Children’s Literature category, said the initiative ensures that funds continue to support literary development even when no winner is announced.
The Nigeria Prize for Literature remains one of Africa’s most prominent literary awards, rotating annually across prose fiction, poetry, drama and children’s literature.
Alongside it, NLNG currently runs the Nigeria Prize for Science and the newly introduced Nigeria Prize for Creative Arts, which replaced the discontinued literary criticism category.
