“With these skills, I began my career as a columnist for my church newspaper, the Good Shepherd, the newspaper of the Archdiocese of Abuja.”
For me as a columnist and lifestyle writer, there is nothing more profound and humbling than having a creative non-fiction award named after me. I am deeply honoured by Sevhage Publishing House’s decision to make me the proud recipient of their creative non-fiction award. It is absolutely inspiring. I am also deeply grateful to the sponsors of the award, ALINEA Initiative, Dr Victor Oladokun and other anonymous donors who supported the award. But even more, my thanks go to award-winning poet and author Sueddie Agema, who is behind Sevhage Publishing House and who together with his team made this decision. I find it difficult to find the right words to thank them for this honour.
Read also: SEVHAGE and Alinea Initiatives establish non-fiction prize in honour of Eugenia Abu
I actually started most of my writing, as I have always said in many previous interviews. By the age of seven, my creativity was aroused and I was drawing stick men and women having cartoon-like conversations at their mouths and writing incredible two-paragraph narratives underneath. My only audience was my father, the highly respected Mr. Alfred Amodu, an educationist, teacher and public servant who reached the pinnacle of his career as the Secretary of State in Benue State and Chairman of several bodies in Kogi State and across the country. My father, a graduate of Oxford University in the United Kingdom and Ohio University in the United States, was well qualified to raise his daughter whose main interest was doodling. My father had two Masters degrees in Educational Psychology and Curriculum Development and listened patiently as I told him fairy tales from my imagination and doodled new characters in my stories almost every week. Mr. Amodu distributed blank sheets of paper in their piles all over the house and allowed me to “waste” them as I pleased.
He inadvertently fuelled my creativity. And over the years, he watched me blossom and become a feature writer for the Guardian newspapers, sharing space with greats: Nobel Laureate Professor Wole Soyinka, award-winning radio presenter and writer Eddie Iroh, leading activist Edwin Madunagu, editor par excellence Ama Ogan, world-renowned virologist Professor Oyewole Tomori, Onukaba Adinoyi Ojo, Editor of the African Guardian Sully Abu, former Daily Times MD Yemi Ogunbiyi and former Guardian MD Eluem Emeka Izeze, to name a few. Those were heady days when my articles appeared in the de facto newspaper of all time, the Guardian, known for redefining print journalism in Nigeria.
Mr. Amodu listened attentively to his precocious seven-year-old as she told him countless stories and even asked questions about the various characters when he returned home after work. Although he was no longer with us when my first book, In the blink of an eye, collection of my Guardian features, was published, he basked in the pride of my broadcasting work and my articles in the Guardian.
As I began to compile my essays, I felt his presence in the process and dedicated the book to my loving father. This creative non-fiction award in my honour is therefore dedicated to that towering man, Mr Alfred Yenisa Amodu, popularly known as AY, who was my beloved father, and a genius father who knew how to channel the creative energy of his daughters.
But over the years, creative nonfiction became my forte. I developed an ability to capture things as they happened with the laser-sharp eyes of a detective and had an incredible eye for detail. My news background might have contributed to this but fiction never left me either and I could use my vivid imagination to tell a nonfiction story with great descriptions and add many side stories that would otherwise have often been missed. With these skills, I began my career as a columnist in my church newspaper, the Good Shepherd, the newspaper of the Archdiocese of Abuja. My column, titled A Walk in the Park, was very well received and is now set to be published as a book. After that, I wrote columns for MTN’s house magazine Y’ello and for a decade had a weekly column for Sunday Trust on books titled Five Favourite Books with Eugenia.
Today I am a columnist at BusinessDay and have been writing Tales from the Main Road for over a decade. I am truly blessed by my writing and soon, by His grace, there will be a travelogue, a cookbook and many other non-fiction books. But fiction still calls to me and I still keep my many fiction pieces and a children’s book collection. I am also collecting my poems that I have written over the last 10 years to follow the critically acclaimed poetry collection. Don’t look at me like that.
So, fellow non-fiction writers, please gather here. It’s time to submit that work gathering dust under your bed, on your desk. I can’t wait to know who won this 2024 Eugenia Abu/Sevhage International Prize for Creative Non-Fiction, which comes with a prize money of 750,000 Naira. Gather here. It’s time!
