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The Abebi AfroNonfiction Institute has announced the winners of the 2025 Abebi Award in AfroNonfiction, celebrating the extraordinary power of Nigerian women’s stories rooted in lived truth, courage, and witness.

Now in its third year, the Award invited submissions on the theme of “Witness” — a call for writers to observe themselves, their communities, and the social forces that shape their lives with radical honesty and emotional precision. The entries, spanning topics from liberation through pain to intimate reckonings with family, faith, and society, reflect creative nonfiction at its most fearless and necessary.

The 2025 Abebi Award honoured a compelling cohort of Nigerian women writers whose essays embody clarity, courage, and literary rigor. The 2025 Abebi Award in AfroNonfiction recognised a powerful body of work by Nigerian women writers whose essays bear witness to grief, faith, embodiment, technology, and survival. 

The winning essay, Ká ríra lọrun by Sapphire Mclaniyi-Agbley, is an intimate portrait of loss and freedom rendered in five striking fragments that refuse easy binaries, holding a father’s passing as both burden and gift within the complexity of human experience. 

The runner-up, The Weight of Our Bodies by Nneoma Kenure, offers a piercing exploration of girlhood and the female form, examining objectification and self-surveillance before arriving at a quiet reckoning about learning to see oneself with care. 

Among the notable entries, Chisom Benedicta Nsiegbunam’s A Lineage of Mantles unfolds as a series of letters to faith matriarchs, interrogating inherited belief and the courage required to forge a personal faith; Erere Onyeugbo’s There Is a Bullet With Your Name On It employs razor-sharp wit to examine Nigeria’s digital landscape, probing screen addiction and technology’s reshaping of intimacy and human connection; and Chinwendu Queenette Nwangwa’s Hold Me in Love, Hide Me in God is a raw, unflinching survivor’s testimony where the brutal and the divine collide, breaking silence and claiming love despite bruised palms.

This year’s cohort was selected from over 200 essays submitted by Nigerian women writers committed to truth-telling, healing, and literary excellence. Each selected piece demonstrates a fierce engagement with personal and communal worlds, shattering silence with grace and unflinching honesty.

Beyond the award itself, the 2025 Abebi cohort participated in an intensive creative nonfiction residency facilitated by Mofiyinfoluwa O., founder of the Abebi AfroNonfiction Institute. The residency focused on creative writing workshop facilitation, with sessions dedicated to mind mapping, editorial development, close reading, and literary analysis. Writers were guided through rigorous processes that strengthened both craft and critical engagement. Equally significant was the power of community cultivated during the residency: participants described the space as safe, affirming, and transformative — a place where women could grow not only as writers, but as individuals. 

The Winner of the 2025 Abebi Award, Sapphire wrote these words in her reflections:

“We spent the last three days learning about writing and reading each other’s work. Reading poetry and immersing ourselves in the craft of writing. Mofiyinfoluwa was with patient hands, showing us how to prune what choked our stories and how to let the strongest roots deepen. These women have shown me that our truths, when planted beside each other, create something more beautiful than any of us could grow alone. It’s not something you achieve in isolation. It’s something that grows when you dare to plant yourself in community, when you let others see the wild, unruly garden you’re trying to make use of your words. We came here as seeds, scattered and uncertain. We’re leaving as gardens, tangled and growing toward the light.”

Founded to foreground women’s lived experiences through creative nonfiction, the Abebi Award is borne from a belief in storytelling as both witness and liberation. As founder, Mofiyinfoluwa O. has previously articulated, the initiative exists not only to celebrate beautiful writing but to equip and empower women to tell their truths without shame. 

Reflecting on the 2025 cohort, she noted that literature can serve as both a mirror and a hammer, forging community, healing wounds, and shaping culture.

The Abebi Award in AfroNonfiction celebrates Nigerian women’s creative nonfiction — essays grounded in lived experience, emotional depth, and literary craft. Sponsored by Selar, the award honours a winner, a runner-up, and notable writers, offering publication opportunities and recognition that amplify their work across Africa and beyond.

Congratulations to the winners of the 2025 Abebi Award in AfroNonfiction!