The Association of Nigerian Authors (ANA) has announced the nine writers selected for the second edition of its Ken Saro-Wiwa International Writers’ Residency, following a debut cohort in 2025 and the subsequent launch of a private creative residency track.

The programme will run for six weeks, from September 5 to October 17, 2026, at the Mamman Vatsa Writers’ Village in Abuja, and this year’s intake expands beyond Nigeria’s borders to include participants from Togo, Ghana, and the United Arab Emirates. ANA president Dr. Usman-oladipo Akanbi frames the residency as part of a broader push to build a sturdier culture of literary residencies within Nigeria, with the selected writers meant to reflect the same fearlessness and moral seriousness associated with the residency’s namesake.

The Nigeria-based cohort brings together a mix of poets, novelists, and essayists at different career stages. Jos-based performance poet and filmmaker David Onotu joins Port Harcourt poet Humphrey Ogu, whose collection Echoes of Neglect won the Elechi Amadi Poetry Prize and was later shortlisted for the Nigeria Prize for Literature. Minna-based writer NmaHassan Muhammad, whose fiction has placed with PRISM International and appeared in Granta, rounds out a group focused heavily on memory, grief, and everyday life in northern Nigeria.

Also selected are Kaduna’s Stephen Adinoyi, a novelist and past ANA chapter chairman with prize-winning work in poetry and nonfiction; Lagos-based essayist and journalist Nusrat Lasisi, currently developing a novel about migration and internet fraud among young Nigerians; and Owerri-based scholar Deborah Uzoma, whose debut children’s book marks her entry into published literature.

The residency’s international arm brings a comparable range of practice. Togolese songwriter and spoken-word artist Jules Olamidé Parfait works at the intersection of music and advocacy, particularly around women’s leadership and cultural heritage. Ghanaian poet Pobee Joseph Mwintombo, a two-time winner of the Kofi Anyidoho Spoken Word Prize and founder of a children’s literary organization, brings a mentorship-driven approach to the cohort. Sudanese novelist Salma Elnour, based in the UAE, joins with a body of work exploring identity and the unstable line between truth and illusion, themes she continues in her current project examining doubt and perception.

Residency manager Hussain Zaguru AbdulQadir oversees the six-week programme on ANA’s behalf, with early congratulations already circulating within Nigeria’s literary community, including from past ANA leadership celebrating the continued growth of the initiative under Akanbi’s presidency.