Oil on Water

About the Author

Born in Nigeria, Helon Habila was working as a journalist in Lagos when his first work of fiction, Waiting for an Angel (written at night, often by candlelight during frequent electrical outages), won the international Caine Prize for African Writing. Waiting for an Angel has been translated into many languages — including Dutch, Italian, Swedish, and French — and it went on to win the 2003 Commonwealth Writers Prize. Habila’s second novel, Measuring Time (2007), won the 2008 Virginia Library Foundation Fiction Award and was shortlisted for the 2008 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award. His short story “The Hotel Malogo” won the Emily Balch Prize and was selected for The Best American Nonrequired Reading anthology.

Habila has been a Radcliffe Fellow at Harvard University, an International Writing Fellow at the University of Iowa, the Chinua Achebe Fellow at Bard College, and the African Writing Fellow at the University of East Anglia in the UK. He is the coeditor of the British Council’s anthology New Writing 14 (2006) and is currently editing The Granta Book of the African Short Story. He is also a contributing editor to the Virginia Quarterly Review. He teaches creative writing at George Mason University and lives in the Washington, DC, area with his family.