Maik Nwosu

Maik Nwosu, editor of The Source news magazine in Lagos, is currently enrolled in a doctoral program at Syracuse University, New York, as a university fellow. Also a fellow of the Akademie Schloss Solitude in Stuttgart, Germany, his first poetry collection, Suns of Kush, won the Association of Nigerian Authors/Cadbury Poetry Prize in 1995. The judging panel, chaired by Professor Theo Vincent, described him as "an important new voice in Nigerian poetry. Taking their origin from his immediate environment, Maik Nwosu's poetry works in wide lyrical sweeps, often brilliantly, dwelling, sometimes with humor and eloquence, on the black man's plight." His first novel, Invisible Chapters, was awarded the Association of Nigerian Authors Prose Prize in 1999. In his review, Odia Ofeimun, former president of the Association of Nigerian Authors, underscored its presentation of "a nuanced picture" that unveils "the unchanging ways of power as they have not been so studiously presented since Wole Soyinka's Season of Anomy." Obi Nwakanma, arts editor of Sunday Vanguard at the time, had earlier noted: "No novel, not since Achebe's Anthills of the Savannah, has created, and with such power, the mood of our post-colonial society. Maik Nwosu's novel has finally declared the arrival of the new generation, and the inexorable passing of the old." Nwosu has also published a collection of short stories, Return to Algadez, and a second novel, Alpha Song. As a journalist, he has received both the Nigeria Media Merit Award for Arts Reporter of the Year and the Nigeria Media Merit Award for Journalist of the Year.