Helon Habila

Helon Habila is the author of Oil on Water, Measuring Time, Waiting for an Angel, and The Chibok Girls. He is associate professor of creative writing at George Mason University. Accompanying his wife on a prestigious arts fellowship in Berlin, a Nigerian scholar finds there are no walls between his privileged, secure existence and the stories of others in the African diaspora, including a transgender film student seeking the freedom to live an authentic life, a Libyan doctor who lost his wife and son in the waters of the Mediterranean, and a Somalian shopkeeper who tried to save his young daughter from a marriage forced upon her by a militant commander. Both unsettling and luminous, Travelers (W. W. Norton & Company) is a lean, heartrending exploration of loss and connection. Vu Tran, author of Dragonfish praised it simply: “Helon Habila writes with the eye of a journalist, the tools of an artist, and the heart of a sober and compassionate witness.”