Helon HabilaHelon Habila

Award-winning writer Helon Habila will present the address “Art and Activism” as the 2018 Clarence De Graaf Memorial Lecture at Hope College on Wednesday, Nov. 28, at 7 p.m. in Winants Auditorium of Graves Hall.

The public is invited.  Admission is free.

Habila, who was born in Nigeria, is an associate professor of creative writing at George Mason University in Virginia.  His most recent book is a nonfiction account of the 2014 kidnapping of schoolgirls in Nigeria, “The Chibok Girls: The Boko Haram Kidnappings and Islamist Militancy in Nigeria” (2017).

His novels include “Waiting for an Angel,” “Measuring Time” and “Oil on Water,” with his next, “Travelers,” to be published in 2019, and he is also the editor of the “Granta Book of African Short Story.”  He is a regular contributor to the UK Guardian, and he has been a contributing editor to the Virginia Quarterly Review since 2004.

Habila’s novels, poems and short stories have won many honors and awards, including the Commonwealth Prize for Best First Novel (Africa Section), the Caine Prize, the Virginia Library Foundation Award for Fiction, and most recently the Windham-Campbell Prize.  He was a creative writing fellow at the University of East Anglia from 2002 to 2004; the first Chinua Achebe Fellow at Bard College in New York; and a DAAD Berlin Fellow in 2014.

The Clarence De Graaf Lectureship was established in 1988 by the family of Dr. Clarence De Graaf in memory of his service on the faculty of Hope College. De Graaf, who died in 1986, taught in the department of English for 44 years, from 1928 until his retirement in 1972, and served as department chair for 25 of those years.

Graves Hall is located at 263 College Ave., between 10th and 12th streets.