Helon Habila

With his first book, Waiting for an Angel, Helon Habila announced himself as a brilliant new talent from Nigeria. Written mostly by candlelight in a Lagos tenement stricken by power cuts, in a language – English – which Habila learned in part through frequent visits to the British Council library, his debut was an astonishing fictional portrait of Lagos and its inhabitants. For an early section of the book, he won the Caine Prize, often spoken of as the ‘African Booker’.

His follow-up, Measuring Time, which was published in early 2007, traces the history of modern Nigeria through the story of two twin brothers, one of whom stays at home in his village and the other of whom leaves to fight in the army. As time goes on, Mamo, who has stayed in their home village, decides that he will write the true history of his people, the one that the white historians of Africa never tell.

Now Habila has written an unwittingly timely novel set against the backdrop of the gas flares and oil spills which litter the Niger Delta. As gripping as any thriller and as thought-provoking as any documentary, Oil on Water shines a powerful and necessary light on the corruption and destruction wreaking havoc in his country.