Nigerian Author Awarded the Olive B. O’Connor Fellowship in Fiction

Nigerian writer, Olakunle Ologunro, has been awarded the prestigious $57,000 Olive B. O’Connor Fellowship in Fiction at Colgate University. The annual fellowship is one of the highly rated creative writing fellowships in the U.S., where only two writers are selected for the award each year. Ologunro is one of the two recipients for the 2025-2026 session.

The fellowship is “designed to support writers completing their first books. It provides a generous stipend, office space, and an intellectual community for the recipients, who spend one academic year at Colgate. In return, each fellow teaches one multigenre creative writing workshop per semester and gives a public reading of their work.”

Before Ologunro, only a few Nigerian writers had been awarded the fellowship, including Chinelo Okparanta (2012-2013), Gbenga Adesina (2019-2020), and Ajibola Tolase (2023-2024).

Olakunle Ologunro received his MFA in creative writing from Johns Hopkins University, where his story, “Besties,” was named an honourable mention for the 2024 Benjamin T. Sankey fellowship. The judge, Asali Solomon, describes his work as “tragic and funny in equal measure, with effortlessly drawn complex and complete characters.”

Olakunle’s writing has been awarded an Elizabeth George Foundation grant, a Tennessee Williams Scholarship for the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, a Juniper Summer Workshop Scholarship, and nominated for a Pushcart prize. His work has also received support from the Virginia Centre for the Creative Arts (VCCA), Vermont Studio Centre, and Aspen Words, where he was named a 2025 Emerging Writer Fellow in Fiction.

His fiction appears or is forthcoming in Story Magazine, Lolwe, the Queer Africa anthology, the Feel Good anthology, the New England Review, and elsewhere. He won the inaugural Kreative Diadem Prize, was a finalist for the 2017 Awele Creative Trust Award, the Gerald Kraak Award for work that provokes thought on the topics of gender, social justice and sexuality, and the Adina Talve-Goodman Fellowship from One Story Magazine. He was also longlisted for the 2024 Commonwealth Prize and the Miles Morland writing scholarship.

Olakunle is an alumnus of the 2016 Farafina Trust Creative Writing Workshop facilitated by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, and is an alumnus of the EbonyLife Creative Academy (ELCA), where he studied The Art of Screenwriting. Ha has written for TV, with writing credits in AfricaMagic telenovelas such as Venge, Itura (2024 winner of the AMVCA Best Scripted Series), and Tinsel, Nigeria’s longest-running TV series.