Why 109 authors lost out of the NLNG Prize

Since inception, the NLNG Prize for Literature has had 10 winners with some being co-winners of the prize. In 2005, the award for the poetry category went to Gabriel Okara and professor Ezenwa and Tade Ipadeola in 2013. In 2006, for Drama it was Ahmed Yerima, Esiaba Irobi in 2010, and Sam Ukala, 2014. In […]

Since inception, the NLNG Prize for Literature has had 10 winners with some being co-winners of the prize. In 2005, the award for the poetry category went to Gabriel Okara and professor Ezenwa and Tade Ipadeola in 2013. In 2006, for Drama it was Ahmed Yerima, Esiaba Irobi in 2010, and Sam Ukala, 2014. In 2008, prose, the winner was Kaine Agary and Chika Unigwe in 2012.
This year’s prize for Children’s Literature was not won by any of the 109 authors who vied for it as was the case in 2004 and 2009.
This raises the question about how previous winners for the category clinched the prize. The NLNG Prize has had three winners for the Children’s literature category so far including Mabel Segun who was co-winner in 2007 for her play ‘Reader’s Theatre,’ made up of twelve plays for children between the ages of eight to fifteen.
The first eight plays are based on popular folktales about animals and talking drums. Each play had moral lessons, with some based on Nigerian history, heroes and heroines, like Queen Moremi, King Jaja of Opobo, and the Egungun festival of Yorubaland. The book has been described as easy to read and fun. Its division into five parts with guidelines attests to that. It shows how to act each play, complete with detailed information on costumes, props, scene changes, tone of voice and facial expressions.        
In the same year as Segun, Professor Akachi Adimora-Ezeigbo won the prize for her novel, ‘My Cousin Sammy.’ In an interview with ‘Munyori Literary Journal,’ Adimora-Ezeigbo said when one writes for children, there is the need to be conscious of vocabulary control, illustrations and the use of dialogue which must be natural, and that she is very careful with her choice of words. “It depends on the level I am writing for at a particular time, whether for children aged five or seven or eleven. All these will affect what I write and how I write it. It takes me a shorter period to write a children’s book than an adult’s. And I have written 21 books for children,” she explained.
Again in 2011, Adeleke Adeyemi won the prize for his work, ‘The Missing Clock,’ an account of how a young boy’s simple acts inspire his family to fortune.
The Emeritus Professor Ayo Banjo-led Advisory Board for The Nigeria Prize for Literature had disclosed that there was no winner for the 2015 edition of the prize, because none of the entries received, met the levels of liter¬ary excellence worthy of Africa’s most prestigious literary prize. 89 of the entries did not meet the preliminary requirements (81.6%) of the total number of entries.
He further pointed out that most of the entries for this year gave inappropriate prominence to the violence, eroticism, mediocrity, cheating in examinations, bullying, mysticism and negative peer pressure. “Distinctions need to be made between children’s literature and literature about children. Children’s lit¬erature should be creative works with aes¬thetic and social values for children,” he said, adding that the works this year also showed evidence of poor editing.
Professor Sam Ukala was winner in 2014 for his play, ‘Iredi War.’ He was to be one of the judges that year, but declined because he wanted to send-in his work.
Judges cannot put out a work which people will pick and be disappointed at the judgment. Ukala explained that when a judge is scrutinizing a work, he is at the same time scrutinizing himself. 
Ukala further said that children’s literature has certain requirements and some of the works presented could have won in other categories, but not for children’s literature. “For example, if you submit my work which won under plays for last year, it will fail. So it does not really mean that those who entered are not good writers, but rather that they have not been able to hone their writing to the demands of children’s literature,” he concluded.
Ahmed Maiwada was one of those short-listed in 2009, a year the prize was not awarded. He described this year’s considerations as “vague and clearly not worthy of basing the overall decision of the prize administrators. He also frowned at the inclusion of an international consultant and disagreed with her position that the 109 books did not have the authority to become classics and asserted that time and the general readers determine that.
The NLNG Prize for Literature awards its winners a sum of $100, 000, making it the largest African literary prize and one of the richest literary prizes in the world.