Helon Habila is a Professor of Creative Writing at George Mason University. He was born in Nigeria where he worked as a journalist before moving to England, and then to the US. He is the author of three novels: Waiting for an Angel (2002), Measuring Time (2007), and Oil on Water (2010). He edited The Granta Book of The African Short Story (2010). His most recent book is The Chibok Girls (2016), a work of investigative nonfiction on the 276 school girls kidnapped by Boko Haram Islamists in northeastern Nigeria in 2014. His next novel, Travelers, will be published in 2019. Habila is a regular contributor to the UK Guardian, and he has been a contributing editor to the Virginia Quarterly Review since 2004. Habila’s work has won many awards including the Caine Prize, the Commonwealth Writers Prize (Africa Region), The Virginia Library Prize for Fiction , and the Windham-Campbell Prize, among many others. Helon Habila lives in Virginia with his family.