A moral argument for the restructuring of the Nigerian literature prize

BY HARISSON MMERENU

Writing about the British poet Phillip Larkin after his passing in 1985, the novelist Martin Amis made the following remark: “When poets die, there is usually a rush to judgment: a revaluation, a retaliation, a reaction.” We have seen all three of these actions in the wake of the latest winner of the Nigerian Prize for Literature, which shows that what Martin Amis regards as the aftermath of a great poet’s demise is a yearly ritual for the prize. Unfortunately, we have witnessed more scabrous retaliation and reactions than a genteel re-evaluation of the award. The two opposing sides have made vehement arguments for praise for a job well done or criticism for a job undone.

For career critics of the prize, each award season is like the death of a great poet. While the prize claims to have improved the quality of Nigerian writing, critics say it has gentrified it. While the prize celebrates the increase in annual entries, critics say there is no evidence that these entries are circulating in libraries and bookstores. And finally, while the prize celebrates its lavish award gala, critics say its reputation in the literary community does not match the allegedly unholy $1 million budget it spends annually.

My intention is not to go down the rabbit hole with these passionate yet disappointed lovers of good Nigerian writing, as I have no interest in the politics of the prize. And I must state emphatically at the outset that we need this prize and more prizes for the arts, culture, and sciences, and therefore calls for its abolition are premature if not self-serving. Instead, my interest is connected to the prize’s initial argument for its existence: improving the quality of writing, editing, and publishing in Nigeria. It is now two decades since the Nigerian Prize for Literature was established. Given the literary landscape that necessitated its founding, it is time for a reappraisal.

To conduct this reappraisal, we must consider what the Nigerian literary landscape looked like before the Nigerian Prize for Literature was instituted. A story that readily comes to mind is one told by a scholar who has conducted extensive research on Nigerian publishing. In her book, Bearing Witness: Readers, Writers, and the Novel in Nigeria, Wendy Griswold describes the Nigerian publishing scene after the oil bust, but one particular story of Nigerian literary history stands out for me. She notes that when the Nigerian writer Ben Okri won the Booker Prize in 1991, there was no Nigerian bookstore selling his book.

At the Association of Nigerian Authors’ annual meeting in November, she observed a British Council representative passing a copy of The Famished Road from one salivating, starstruck reader to another as material evidence of Okri’s brilliance. I have often doubted this story as a mere rhetorical strategy to demonstrate the failure of Nigerian publishing until I discovered how close to home it can be, even for books nominated for the 2025 Nigerian Prize for Literature. At the risk of stating the obvious, Griswold’s observation portrays a broken supply chain in the publishing scene.

After the 2025 longlist was announced, the old but still valid criticism of the Nigerian prize resurfaced. Career critics of the award quickly pointed out the overwhelming presence of diaspora writers on the longlist and the message this sends to home-based writers about the award’s priorities. In other words, if the prize’s acclaimed mission is to improve writing, editing, and publishing in Nigeria, does it really do so if its longlist is a gallery of diasporeans? The second criticism has been the ease with which books that have won the prize in the past have disappeared from circulation within a few years. With a few exceptions, many of the books so far awarded the most prestigious prize for Nigerian writing cannot be found in Nigerian public or academic libraries across the country. This scenario smirks of the monumentalization of the writer at the expense of the collective growth of Nigerian letters. These are valid criticisms, and yet they speak to a broader problem in Nigerian publishing that has nothing to do with the Nigerian Prize for Literature. That last sentence is only valid if the Nigerian Prize for Literature did not state in its mission that it was committed to improving the quality of publishing in Nigeria. And the idea of circulation is embedded in the concept of publishing.

The question then is, how do you improve the quality of publishing if you put all your reward money in one basket each year? In this case, the basket of the writer. What is the best way to get the books to the reading public so that each year the prize would not be limited to five judges and ten writers speaking to themselves, but also students in our high schools and universities, and the general public joining the conversation as well-informed individuals? What I am gesturing to with these questions is what Jurgen Habermas and Michael Warner separately described as a literary public, in their works, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere and Publics and Counterpublics, respectively.

For a literary public to exist, its participants must actively engage with it. What the Nigerian Prize for Literature has been able to do over the past twenty years is create a condition in which the literary public is made up of judges and writers alone. This condition has denied the general public the freedom to engage with this literary prize, which offers a significant award but has earned less respect than its counterparts on the continent, such as the Caine Prize for African Writing or the Commonwealth Writing Prize. What these other prizes offer is the ability to easily find the stories nominated. When readers read these works themselves, it creates an air of transparency, inclusion, and dedication to the process that is utterly absent from the Nigerian Prize for Literature. Even though these two prizes focus on short stories, their processes still offer lessons for the Nigerian prize.

Do I expect the Nigerian Prize for Literature to shoulder the responsibility of publishing? My answer is a big NO. However, they can initiate processes in the publishing sector to encourage greater circulation of these works once they are longlisted. A special edition of 1,000 copies of these longlisted books can be donated to libraries. Their publishers can receive a small grant to produce additional copies in anticipation of the final decision. We can call these editions the Nigerian Prize for Literature edition. But to do this, someone must be willing to stop playing it safe with the prize each year and summon the moral courage to think of better ways to make the award serve the Nigerian literary community and not just judges and writers. A situation in which some of the prize winners have now become like Eneke the bird in Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, who has learned to fly without perching, is unacceptable. The Nigerian Prize for Literature should ensure its books are on our library and bookstore shelves, even if only for a short time, and even if that means restructuring the prize to benefit publishers directly and empower them to flood bookstores and libraries with these books.

Literary prizes monumentalize writers. This bounden duty is undeniable, but it comes with an equal expectation. That after these writers are monumentalized, there should be a chain reaction as well. Readers should be able to find their works in bookshops and libraries as evidence of what good Nigerian writing can be and should be. A situation in which prize-winning writers disappear from the public eye and their books are absent from libraries and bookstores sends the wrong signal about the award and its effectiveness in stimulating the country’s reading and writing culture.

In fact, awards without commensurate public curiosity about the books or their continued availability in libraries and bookstores lend credence to naysayers of the prize who argue that it is nothing more than a private lottery for friends of the judges. While there is no evidence of corruption in the award’s organisation, there is clear evidence of a failure of imagination in positioning it as Africa’s foremost literary prize. We must take ourselves seriously if we want outsiders to take our institutions seriously as well. The Nigerian Prize for Literature must remove this robe of money-miss-road that it currently dons. As a prize sponsored by a company whose activities have a direct impact on the environment, it has a moral responsibility to operate in ways that benefit every Nigerian. The winner-takes-it-all mentality does not work when all Nigerians bear the environmental consequences of the goose that lays the golden egg.

Harrison Mmerenu is a PhD candidate at Texas Tech University. He can be reached at [email protected]