Abubakar Adam Ibrahim is an award-winning Nigerian writer and journalist. He has published two critically acclaimed novels and two short story collections. His debut novel, Season of Crimson Blossoms, won the 2016 NLNG Nigeria Prize for Literature, Africa’s largest literary prize. The French translation was shortlisted for the prestigious Prix Femina Etranger, and the novel has also been translated into German and Tamil. His debut short story collection, The Whispering Trees (2012) was longlisted for the Etisalat Prize for Literature; its title story was shortlisted for the 2013 Caine Prize for African Writing. Abubakar’s second short story collection Dreams and Assorted Nightmares was published by Masobe Books in 2022. His new novel, When We Were Fireflies, was published in Nigeria in 2023 and is due out in French and German in 2024.  

 

Abubakar is a Gabriel Garcia Marquez Fellow (2013), a Civitella Ranieri Fellow (2015) and has received additional writing residencies in Germany, France, and the US. He has spoken at major international writing festivals across the world and was included in the Hay Festival’s Africa39 anthology of the most promising sub-Saharan African writers under the age of 40. Abubakar’s non-fiction work has appeared in publications including Granta, The Economist, The Guardian, Berliner Zeitung and the anthology Of This Our Country (Borough Press, 2022). In 2018, he won the Michael Elliott Award for Excellence in African Storytelling awarded by the International Centre for Journalists, New York. He was a 2018 Ochberg Fellow at the Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism.  

 

Abubakar has facilitated writing workshops in South Africa, Nigeria, Ghana and the UAE. In July 2024 he organised and led the Flame Tree Writers Workshop, a week-long initiative for writers from Northern Nigeria, sponsored by the Heinrich Böll Stiftung. Since 2019, he has been a judge on the Michael Elliott Award, in New York; he has also judged the Quramo Writing Prize (2021 and 2022), and the Writivism Writing Prize, amongst others. He worked for over a decade for The Daily Trust (Nigeria), where he continues to write a weekly column and sit on the editorial board. He is currently pursuing a PhD in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Iowa; his research revolves around the intersection of information disorder, politics and media representation.