The Sprinng Women Authors Prize

- 2020

 We congratulate Cheluchi Onyemelukwe-Onuobia, Author of The Son of the House for being the first winner of the Sprinng Women Authors Prize! Cheluchi’s book is currently available through Roving Heights Bookstore ​and Okadabooks.

We also congratulate Olaoluwa Oni, Author of The yNBA, for emerging as the first runner-up and Azizah Idris M., Author of A Sackful of Wishes, for emerging as the second runner-up.

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Cheluchi Onyemelukwe-Onuobia is the author of the critically acclaimed novel, The Son of the House, published by Penguin Random House South Africa and Parresia Publishers, Nigeria, and forthcoming in 2021 from Durndurn Press in North America, Europa Editions in the UK, and Edizioneo in Italian.  It won the Best International Fiction Book Award at the Sharjah International Book Fair in 2019 and was named a Top Ten Fiction Book by Channels Book Club. Cheluchi is a lawyer and academic who has done extensive work on health, gender, and other social sector issues.

An advocate, she is the founder of CHELD, a nonprofit that does considerable violence against women and girls and mental health. She holds a doctorate in Law from Dalhousie University, Canada and a First-Class degree in Law from the University of Nigeria. Her writing has appeared most recently in The Johannesburg Review of Books and Entropy.

She is currently working on her second novel.

First Runner-up

Second Runner-up

Olaoluwa Oni practices as a litigator and corporate attorney. Her creative writing and think pieces have appeared online in Brittle Paper, Cable.ng, Sabinews, and in print in Thisday Newspaper. In 2016, she won the Brittle Paper Award for creative writing and was shortlisted for the Ake Festival/Air France prize for literature in 2015.

Azizah Idris M. grew up in Gombe, Nigeria. She holds an M.Sc in Computer Science from the Abubakar Tafawa Balewa University, Bauchi, and has a certificate in Islamic Psychology at the International Open University.

She is currently studying Intensive Arabic at the University. A bi-lingual writer, Azizah Idris, has written fifteen Hausa Language novels, including Al'amarin Zuci, Halin Girma, and Zubar Kwalla, as well as a cookbook in English and Hausa, titled My Kitchen Essentials and Dandanon Gida. She has one other published English novel, The Surgeon's Wife. As a writer with a healthy appetite and focus on the Arewa lifestyle, romance fiction, and mystery, Azizah has over 4 million online reads on Wattpad and has eight eBooks published on Okadabooks.

She is currently a Secretary of the Gombe State Writers' Association. Azizah is the head ICT department at the Gombe State Muslim Pilgrims' Board in the daytime, and as a noted chef, she runs her culinary school in Gombe over the weekends, where she lives with her husband and three young children.

The 2020 SWAP Judges

We are thankful to the SWAP 2020 judges: Hauwa Shaffii Nuhu, Eketi Edima Ette, I.S Jones, and Mona Zutshi Opubor for their dedication and support in selecting the semi-finalists and winner of the first Sprinng Women Authors Prize.