Chika Unigwe has won the highly coveted Nigeria Prize for Literature for her novel On Black Sister’s Street.


Her novel competed against Only A Canvas by Olusola Olugbesan and Onaedo: The Blacksmith’s Daughter by Ngozi Achebe. The announcement was made by Emeritus Professor Ayo Banjo, Chairman of the Advisory Board who commended the prize winner's novel as “a work of outstanding merit”, while Professor Abiola Irele, Chair of Judges said: “What is striking about Chika Unigwe's novel is the compassion that informs it.”

Unigwe said when she saw the news on Twitter, she started crying.
Unigwe was born in Nigeria, but now lives in Belgium.
The Nigeria Prize for Literature is fully sponsored by the Nigeria LNG Limited.

Click here to read Toni Kan's interview with Chika Unigwe as she received the good news after the announcement on Thursday November 1, 2012.

Despite the horrors it depicts, “On Black Sisters Street” is also boiling with a sly, generous humor. Unigwe is as adept at conveying the cacophony of a Nigerian bus as she is at suggesting the larger historical events that propel her characters. “On Black Sisters Street” marks the arrival of a latter-day Thackeray, an Afro-Belgian writer who probes with passion, grace and comic verve the underbelly of our globalized new world economy.

~ By Fernanda Eberstadt, Sunday Book Review of The New York Times, April 29, 2011.

Raw, vivid, unforgettable, and inspired by a powerful oral storytelling tradition, this novel illuminates the dream of the West—and that dream’s illusion and annihilation—as seen through African eyes. It is a story of courage, unity, and hope, of women’s friendships and of bonds that, once forged, cannot be broken.
~ Amazon.

On Black Sisters Street tells the haunting story of four very different women who have left their African homeland for the riches of Europe—and who are thrown together by bad luck and big dreams into a sisterhood that will change their lives.


Each night, Sisi, Ama, Efe, and Joyce stand in the windows of Antwerp’s red-light district, promising to make men’s desires come true—if only for half an hour. Pledged to the fierce Madam and a mysterious love-vendor named Dele, the girls share an apartment but little else—they keep their heads down, knowing that one step out of line could cost them a week’s wages. They open their bodies to strangers but their hearts to no one, each focused on earning enough to get herself free, to send money home or save up for her own future.

Then, suddenly, a murder shatters the still surface of their lives. Drawn together by tragedy and the loss of one of their own, the women realize that they must choose between their secrets and their safety. As they begin to tell their stories, their confessions reveal the face in Efe’s hidden photograph, Ama’s lifelong search for a father, Joyce’s true name, and Sisi’s deepest secrets—-and all their tales of fear, displacement, and love, concluding in a chance meeting with a handsome, sinister stranger.

On Black Sisters Street marks the U.S. publication debut of Chika Unigwe, a brilliant new writer and a standout voice among contemporary African authors.

Read the complete article and download the podcast on your mobile devices only on http://www.nigeriansreport.com/2012/11/chika-unigwe-wins-100000-nigeria-prize.html