Celebrating Ndi-Igbo

Arinze Kene is an actor and playwright. He is best known for playing the character of Connor Stanley in the BBC's EastEnders . Born in Nigeria, Arinze relocated to Hackney, East London with his family in the early 1990s as a toddler. He has also appeared in stage productions such as playing Simba in The Lion King, the short-lived Boney M musical Daddy Cool, and in June 2009 he played strutting lothario Raymond LeGrendre in the musical Been So Long , based on Ché Walker's 1998 play, which opened at the Young Vic. Kene also plays the lead in 2010 UK Film Council feature Freestyle and is currently splitting his time between filming EastEnders in Hertfordshire and rehearsals for his new play Estate Walls which is being staged at the Oval House Theatre, South London. Sources: soulculture.co.uk Thanks Cuz

24 year old Ikenna Orizu is the founder and CEO of Tru Spot! , one of the Africa's few Web 2.0 success stories. Tru Spot! is a social music platform designed to support African artists, fans, local music and the entertainment world at large. Tru Spot! connects users who share similar tastes and brings the artists they love closer to them via interviews and chat sessions. The site also provides live and custom radio streams, music ringtones for your mobile phones and wallpapers. Tru Spot! started off as a web site named NaijaSpace in May of 2006 - a podacst for African DJ mixes. It re-launched as Tru Spot! when Ikenna decided to scale the project upwards and take African music to a global audience. Tru Spot! also features a unique live station with well produced shows and hosts. It has about 750 thousand listeners. Tru Spot! also developed the first African radio blackberry web application. Sources: StartupsNigeria , Wikipedia

One to watch London-based Chibundu Onuzo is a 19-year-old Nigerian undergraduate student who recently signed a two-novel deal with the British publisher Faber, making her its youngest ever woman author. Chibundu Onuzo, a history student at King’s College London, will have her first novel, “The Spider King’s Daughter,” published next year. This novel tells the story of the unlikely friendship between a male street hawker and an ajebota girl whose father is a member of the country’s ‘corrupt elite’. Onuzo is the latest of a new generation of talented young Nigerian writers — many of them female — who have made their mark in the literary world in the past few years. They include Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie who won the 2007 Orange Prize for Fiction for “Half of A Yellow Sun”; Adaobi Tricia Nwaubani who published her first novel, “I Do Not Come To You By Chance,” last year, which has also garnered several awards, including the Commonwealth Writers Prize and Chika Unigwe , an Afro-Belgian aut...