The Women of Biafra

His debut novel The Abyssinian Boy (2009) won the TM Aluko Prize for Fiction and the Tahir Ibrahim Prize for First Book. His other novels include The Beginning of Everything Colorful (2018) and The Strangers of Braamfontein (2021), which won the ANA Prize for Fiction in 2021 and Best Indie Novel Winner at the Crime Fiction Lover Awards in 2021.

In an eclectic career that combines writing, publishing, filmmaking, music production and running Blues & Hills, a literary agency in Nigeria, co-founded World Arts Agency in South Africa, Nwelue was also an Academic Visitor and founder of the James Currey Society at the University of Oxford’s African Studies Centre, and Visiting Scholar at the Centre of African Studies in the University of Cambridge.

In 2016, Nwelue’s The House of Nwapa, a documentary film on Africa’s first published female novelist, Flora Nwapa, premiered in Harare. His Igbo-language film, Agwaetiti Obiuto, an adaptation of his novella Island of Happiness, received enormous recognition, winning Best Feature Film by a director at the 2018 Newark International Film Festival, and the Ousmane Sembène Award for Best Film in an African Language at the 2018 Africa Movie Academy Awards (AMAA).

He is currently the director of Africa Center Mexico.