Helon Habila is a Professor of Creative Writing at George Mason University, Virginia. He was born in Nigeria where he worked as a journalist before moving to the US. He is the author of four novels: Waiting for an Angel, Measuring Time, Oil on Water and Travellers. He edited The Granta Book of The African Short Story.
His book of nonfiction, The Chibok Girls, focuses on the 276 school girls kidnapped by Boko Haram Islamists in northeastern Nigeria in 2014. Habila is a regular contributor to the UK Guardian, and a contributing editor to the Virginia Quarterly Review.
Habila’s work has won many awards including the Caine Prize, the Commonwealth Writers Prize (Africa Region), The Virginia Library Prize for Fiction , and the Windham-Campbell Prize, among many others.