Cheluchi Onyemelukwe-Onuobia has emerged winner of the $100,000 NLNG Literature Prize for 2021 with her novel, the Son of the House.
Chairman, Advisory Board, the Nigeria Prize for Literature & Literary Criticism, Prof Akachi Adimorah-Ezeigbo explained on Saturday in Lagos that the journey leading to the announcement started several months ago with the receipt of 202 Novels for the Literature Prize since the genre in focus is Prose Fiction.
“Immediately the Panel of Judges was constituted, they swung into action and despite the challenges imposed by the pandemic, found creative ways to do their work meticulously, using a set of 11 clearly defined and approved Criteria.
“The Panel of judges also worked in close coordination with the Advisory Board, and the Secretariat of the Prize to produce evaluate and prune down the 202 entries to 50, then 25. From this point, they were able to produce a longlist of 11 and thereafter, a shortlist of 3.
“For the avoidance of doubt, the final three novels shortlisted are mentioned here in alphabetical order of author’s name:
Abi Dare’s TheGirl with Louding Voice;
CheluchiOnyemelukwe-Onuobia’sThe Son of the House; and
Obinna Udenwe’sColours of Hatred
In a sense, the shortlisted Novels are axioms of a profound ‘paradigm shift’ from the preoccupation of the Nigerian Novel with collective, nationalist issues to an interrogation of the permeation of the notion of ‘the end justifies the means and the autonomy of the self or primacy of individuality in defining and pursuing what best serves its immediate interests. This portrait erases the efficacy of the moral distinction between the urban (loose and corrupting) and the rural (serene and authentic) in designation of the postcolonial space or setting by first and second generation of Nigerian writers. In aesthetic terms, the entries have, in divergent ways, been influenced by or constituted out of an interface between creative writing, film, home video and romance.
Abi Dare’s The Girl with the Louding Voice was published in 2020 by Sceptre. It is a narrative that tells the story of the plight of a girl-child, a valuable commodity who is sold into marriage at an early age. The heroine, Adunni, is forced by poverty and the death of her mother to drop out of school. She is married off to an elderly polygamous man with a view to raising funds for her father’s survival. The novel also tackles the issue of early marriage, child sexual abuse, childlessness in marriage, and domestic violence on one hand; and on the other, the urgent need of female bonding or sisterhood in transcending the constraints that have been placed in the life of women by men.
CheluchiOnyemelukwe-Onuobia’sThe Son of the House was published in 2019 by Parresia Publishers. The novel presents the predicaments of two women, Nwabulu a one-time housemaid and a successful fashion designer; and Julie, an educated woman who lived through tricks, deceits and manipulations, as they meet in captivity. Both women decide to tell each other their stories. They soon discover that their lives had crossed at different points. The subject matter of the novel is developed through the rupture of traditional plot and the mediation of a single narrative voice. It is made up of a prologue and a three-part story moments, each dominated by multiple points of narration, The Son of the House is an experimental novel with a complex plot structure made up of the main plot and several subordinate plots that intercept.
Obinna Udenwe’sColours of Hatred is a plot-driven detective storyand published by Parresia in 2020. The novel is a confessional that centres on the story of Leona of the Dinka tribe and her involvement in the killing of her father-in-law. It is a whodunit, which through introspection and re-telling explores issues of love, hatred, war, revenge, oppression, extra-judicial killings, military rule, displacement and exile with their attendant tensions that leave scars on people and homes. In this context, the novel draws substantially from the tradition of modernism and deploys investigative techniques of detective narratives and flashbacks to account for what has happened.
After a careful scrutiny of the three Novels, the Panel of Judges and the Advisory Board have, in consideration of its profundity of technique and subject matter as a Nigerian family saga, its thematic depth and social relevance as a commentary on the diversity of collective experiences that shape, hold and mar families in postcolonial Nigeria, and its feminist undertones, found CheluchiOnyemelukwe-Onuobia’sThe Son of the House outstanding, and declare it the Winner of the 2021 Nigeria Prize for Literature.
