The Speculative Literature Foundation is pleased to announce that Hannah Onoguwe is the winner of their 2024 Working Class Writers Grant for her work “Eyes of the Igbadai.”
Onoguwe’s winning piece is called “Eyes of the Igbadai.”
Shortlisted were Katherine Cart, Loren Smith, Moraine Velasco and Marianne Xenos.
Since 2013 the Working Class Writers Grant has been awarded annually to speculative fiction writers who are working class, blue-collar, financially disadvantaged, or homeless, who have been historically underrepresented in speculative fiction due to financial barriers which make it hard to access the writing world. Learn more at the Working Class Writers Grant webpage.
Hannah Onoguwe’s speculative fiction has appeared in Omenana, Imagine Africa 500, Eleven Eleven, Pervisions, Mysterion, Timeworn LitMag, Flame Tree Press, and Mukana with other fiction in various literary magazines and anthologies. In 2016 she won the poetry contest organized by the Bayelsa State chapter of the Association of Nigerian Authors, was shortlisted for the 2020 Afritondo Short Story Prize and longlisted for the 2022 Commonwealth Short Story Prize.
Her collection of short stories, Cupid’s Catapult, was one of the ten books to kickstart the Nigerian Writers Series, an imprint of the Association of Nigerian Authors. She is a charter member of the African Speculative Fiction Society, an Associate member of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association, and a Climate Imagination Fellow with the Centre for Science and the Imagination at Arizona State University. She has served as a judge for various contests including the Hysteria Writing Competition and the Bloody Parchment HorrorFest.
She holds a Bachelor’s degree in Psychology from the University of Ibadan and a Master’s in Organizational Psychology from the University of Jos. She has served as Secretary of the Bayelsa State chapter of the Association of Nigerian Authors, and has a novel forthcoming with Ouida Press’s Books of Phoenix in 2025. Hannah is a mother of three and lives in Yenagoa.
The Speculative Literature Foundation is a non-profit organization dedicated to promoting literary quality in speculative fiction. They encourage promising new writers, assist established writers, facilitate the work of quality magazines and small presses in the genre, and work to promote a greater public appreciation of speculative fiction. Learn more at speculativeliterature.org.
The SLF is a 501(c)3 non-profit, entirely supported by community donations. If you’d like to be involved with their efforts, consider joining as a member for $2/month, at speculativeliterature.org/membership.
The Speculative Literature Foundation is partially funded by the Oak Park Area Arts Council, in partnership with the Village of Oak Park; the Illinois Arts Council; and the National Endowment for the Arts.
[Based on a press release.]