Committee announces winner for the Ken Saro Wiwa critical review competition

Organisers of the Lagos Book and Art Festival (LABAF) finally chooses winner for the Ken Saro Wiwa critical review competition.

After a rigorous selection process, The Committee For Relevant Art (CORA) will, this afternoon, announce the winner of the at the Lagos Book and Art Festival (LABAF), holding at Freedom Park on Broad Street in Lagos.

The first of its kind in Nigeria, the competition encouraged Nigerians between the ages 18 and 41 to review any one of the five works of late writer and environmental activist, Ken Saro Wiwa.

Toni Kan, chairman of the panel of judges, said that two outstanding essays towered above other reviews and were too close to call. These two reviews were “distinguished by elegant prose, attention to detail and a perspicacious understanding of what it means to read and review a book”.

“They were so close Uzo Maxim Uzoatu asked that they both be declared joint winners and so we had to seek a 3rd opinion”, Mr. Kan reported in his Judges’ statement .

“These top reviewers have given us two great works, one better only by a margin, a margin created not by superior intelligence per se, but by a decision to venture further in a spirit of abandon”, Kan declared.

CORA  is enormously grateful to the judges for agreeing to do this at such terribly short notice and following through. “We see in these two writers, the significant possibilities of the continent and we salute their spirit of respoinsibility”, notes Jahman Anikulapo, CORA’s programme chairman.

With the successful outcome of this competition, and the emergence of a winner who has so impressed the judges, CORA is encouraged to run this Book Review Competition Every Year.

This year's winner will receive a bank draft for 100,000 Naira as well as a certificate.

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