Habila, Helon 1967-

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HABILA, Helon 1967-

PERSONAL: Born 1967, in Kaitungu, Gombe, Nigeria; son of Habila Ngalabak and Alheri Habila Hgalabak; married; wife's name Susan; children: Alheri Edna. Ethnicity: "Tangale." Education: University of Jos (literature), graduated 1995. Politics: Liberal. Religion: Christian. Hobbies and other interests: Taekwando, history, biography.

ADDRESSES: Home—England. Agent—Curtis Brown Literary Agency, Haymarket House, 28-29 Haymarket, London SW1Y 4SP, England. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER: Writer. University of East Anglia, writer-inresidence, 2002—; Federal Polytechnic, Bauchi, Nigeria, literature lecturer, 1997-99; Vanguard, (newspaper) Lagos, Nigeria, arts editor.

AWARDS, HONORS: Caine Prize for African Writing, 2001, for "Love Poems," the opening section of Waiting for an Angel; Africa Best First Book Award, Commonwealth Writers Prize, 2003, for Waiting for an Angel.

WRITINGS:

Waiting for an Angel, Hamish Hamilton (London, England), 2002, W. W. Norton (New York, NY), 2003.

SIDELIGHTS: Growing up in Nigeria in the 1970s, Helon Habila began reading to escape the world around him. His native country had suffered from one political disaster after another over the course of his lifetime, leaving Habila with little hope for the future. At the same time he discovered the power of books, Habila was mastering the art of storytelling so well that his primary school teachers took him around to the other classes to tell his tales. After high school he enrolled in an engineering course, to follow in his father's career path, but Habila dropped out after one year. He was unsure of what to do with his life, but a copy of E. M. Forster's Aspects of the Novel gave him the inspiration to return to literature and "offered him a map to a new life in which he was a writer," explained Frank Bures in an interview with Habila for the Web site Poets and Writers. He found his way back to college, this time studying English at the University of Jos.

After college Habila got a position as an assistant lecturer at a university in Bauchi. While there he wrote a draft of a novel, eventually titled Waiting for an Angel, an interwoven collection of short stories about a young journalist, Lomba, working in Lagos during the 1990s under the oppressive rule of General Sani Abacha, Nigeria's dictator. The book opens with Lomba in prison secretly writing poetry with forbidden pencil and paper and moves back and forth in time, ending with the events leading to his arrest. It captures the story of how an apolitical student trying to make a literary career for himself is drawn into Nigeria's struggle for freedom. Not all of the chapters are narrated by Lomba, some are written in the third person and others by a high school student named Kela, who lives near Lomba in Lagos's depressed Poverty Street quarter. A reviewer for Publishers Weekly praised Habila for painting "an extraordinary tableau of Poverty Street, bringing their sounds, sights and smells to life with his spare prose and flair for metaphor." Similar praise came from New Statesman contributor Matthew Jennings, who observed that "Habila invests these remarkably real characters with compassion, fear, humour and love. They are driven by powerful moral convictions, undeterred by the inevitable consequences of their actions-jail, beatings, humiliation and the destruction of all they own." In a profile for African Writers Abroad, Habila explained that what inspired Waiting for an Angel "was that I lived in that time and saw how young people were suppressed. It was very bleak and a very bad time for young people. I was one of them. So writing that book was purgation for me. Just trying to get that weight off my chest."

When Habila found a notice for the Caine Prize for African Writing he posed as his own publisher and submitted the first chapter of his novel. It won the prize. Soon thereafter his book was published in Britain and his career was launched to significant acclaim. Guardian writer Maya Jaggi hailed the book as a "powerful" first novel, adding that "the novel's artistry is manifest in the mordant strength and clarity of its language, and its compelling structure." And in Spectator, Francis King wrote that the "texture of [Habila's] writing is exhilaratingly fresh and springy." King concluded that Waiting for an Angel is a work of "radiant promise."