Abubakar Adam Ibrahim is an award-winning Nigerian writer and journalist. He has published two critically acclaimed novels and two short story collections. His debut novel, Season of Crimson Blossoms, won the 2016 NLNG Nigeria Prize for Literature, Africa’s largest literary prize, and the French translation of the book was shortlisted for the prestigious Prix Femina Etranger. The novel has also been translated into German and Tamil. His debut short story collection, The Whispering Trees (2012) was longlisted for the Etisalat Prize for Literature; its title story was shortlisted for the 2013 Caine Prize for African Writing. Abubakar’s second short story collection Dreams and Assorted Nightmares was published by Masobe Books in 2022. His new novel, When We Were Fireflies, was published in Nigeria in 2023 and is due out in French and German in 2024.

Abubakar is a Gabriel Garcia Marquez Fellow (2013), a Civitella Ranieri Fellow (2015) and has received additional writing residencies in Germany, France, and the US. He has spoken at major international writing festivals across the world and was included in the Hay Festival’s Africa39 anthology of the most promising sub-Saharan African writers under the age of 40. Abubakar’s non-fiction work has appeared in publications including Granta and Berliner Zeitung, and the anthology Of This Our Country (2022). In 2018, he won the Michael Elliott Award for Excellence in African Storytelling awarded by the International Centre for Journalists, New York.

Abubakar has been a mentor at the Writivism Writers Workshop in Uganda and has facilitated writing workshops in South Africa, Nigeria, Ghana and the UAE. Since 2019, he has been a judge on the Michael Elliott Award, in New York. He has also judged the Quramo Writing Prize (2021 and 2022), and the Writivism Writing Prize, amongst others. He writes a weekly column for the Daily Trust and has contributed to The Economist, The Guardian UK and the BBC.

Follow on Twitter @Abbakar__himself

View journalism: https://muckrack.com/abubakar-adam-ibrahim/articles