Twenty-six-year-old Nigerian writer and filmmaker, Onyeka Nwelue, who dropped out from the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, has been appointed a visiting lecturer of African Studies at the School of Modern Languages and Cultures, Faculty of Arts, at the University of Hong Kong.
On welcoming him, the head of department, Dr. Marketa Moore said: “Mr. Nwelue, it would be a great honour to have you as a guest lecturer in our Africa foundation course at the Hong Kong University. In this course we have over 40 students (mainly from Hong Kong but also a number of international students). They are very enthusiastic in learning more about Africa and African literature. It would be an excellent opportunity for them to have a chance to meet you and learn about your work.”
Born in 1988, Onyeka Nwelue has managed to rack up an enviable directory of achievements in a very short while. He wrote his first book, Abyssinian Boy, at the age of 18 when most of his age-mates were too busy waddling through the labyrinthine walls of puberty to sit down and pen critically-acclaimed literature, which won the T.M Aluko Prize for First Book of Fiction and came second at the Ibrahim Tahir Prize for Fiction at the 2009 Abuja Writers Forum Literary Contest.
He went on to be nominated for the Future Awards three times. To prove he was not a one-hit wonder, as most prodigies are, he followed Abyssinian Boy up with Burnt, a narrative in verse, which was published in 2014 to worldwide critical acclaim and described by British-Hungarian poet, George Szirtes as ‘breathless’. Channel O has described him as ‘an unalloyed genius.’
As if the above are not enough to characterize him as a truly exceptional individual, he is also the founder and CEO of Blues and Hills Consultancy, which organised the first and second editions of the Bayelsa Book and Craft Fair and was featured on MTV Meets MTN with Ben Murray-Bruce.
Partly as a result of his involvement with Blues and Hills and largely because he is a terrifically interesting individual, he has been invited to several conferences, some of which are SWITCH Conference, Portugal and Creative Industries Session, Serbia. He became the first African to join Sandbox, a global community of young innovators under 30.
Furthermore, he is a 2013 recipient of the 2013 Prince Claus Fund Ticket Grant, which he won to travel to Uganda for Writivism Festival and meet the Idi Amin family.
Mr Nwelue is a contributor for The Trent who writes for The Trent Voices. Read his articles here.
