BJ, as he is fondly and simply called, is Professor Emeritus of English at Cornell University and Professor Emeritus of Comparative Literature at Harvard University. He was the foundational National President of Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU). Apart from protesting the anti-people policies of General Ibrahim Babangida, the Union…

On Friday, 27 June 1980, at Oduduwa Hall, University of Ife, a memorial rally was held with speeches and poems for Walter Rodney, the Guyanese author of How Europe Underdeveloped Africa and other path-breaking, radical writings, who was assassinated in Georgetown, Guyana, on 13 June 1980. Organised by Positive Review…

On Sunday, March 24, 2019, P.A.G.E. Book Connoisseurs organised an evening of readings and conversation with Chigozie Obioma, whose second novel, An Orchestra of Minorities, was just published in Nigeria by Parresia. It was a very rewarding encounter with Obioma, who was born in Akure, Ondo State, to an Igbo…

Nuruddin Farah is a visiting professor of Literature at Bard College, upstate New York in the United States of America. A highly gifted and hardworking novelist and playwright, he has won major international prizes, including Neustadt International Prize for Literature. Born 73 years ago in Baidoa, Somalia, his father was…

Born forty-three years ago in Michigan, United States of America, Teju Cole was raised in Lagos until he was seventeen when he left Nigeria for Kalamazoo College where he earned his Bachelor’s degree in 1996. He later did his graduate studies in Art History at the School of Oriental and…

In May 2005, Holden Harriman Quinn, a hedge fund arbitrage based in Manhattan, New York, placed a huge bet against the future of Turkey. The very next day, the chief of police in Ankara, the capital of that country, and the CEO of one of the country’s major industrial conglomerates,…

When the founding editor of London Review of Books, Karl Miller, died in 2014, many elegies were written for him by his poet friends. One of the poets, Richard Murphy, wrote that Miller’s “presence made the darkest day feel clear”. The testimonies of those who knew him intimately and the…