Celebrating Ndi-Igbo

  Okechukwu Nzelu is a Manchester-based writer. In 2015 he was the recipient of a Northern Writers' Award from New Writing North. In 2020 his debut novel, The Private Joys of Nnenna Maloney , won a Betty Trask Award and was shortlisted for the Betty Trask Prize, the Desmond Elliott Prize, and the Polari First Book Prize. In 2021, it was selected for the Kingston University Big Read.  He is a regular contributor to Kinfolk magazine. His second novel, Here Again Now, will be published by Dialogue Books/Little,Brown in March 2022.  He is a Lecturer in Creative Writing at Lancaster University. Sources: Hachette, Nzelu.org

Ifeanyi Awachie is a writer and curator. She studied English at Yale, where she produced a multimedia novella as her senior project in the competitive Writing Concentration. She wrote, performed, and competed with Teeth Slam Poets, Yale's nationally-recognized slam poetry team, of which she was Artistic Director. She was chosen to perform her poem Let's Commence as the Ivy Ode, an annual tribute to Yale College, at the 2014 Class Day Ceremony. A visual thinker, Ifeanyi uses photography as a means of storytelling. Determined to find images of Nigeria she sensed were missing from mainstream media, she traveled alone to the country for the first time since birth to start the multimedia project Summer in Igboland, aimed at documenting Nigeria in a nuanced way and rebranding it in a positive light. She won the Tristan Perlroth Prize for Summer Foreign Travel to support the project and has hosted multiple exhibits at Yale. In 2015, she published a book based on her experienc...