Three women from the North, Middle-Belt and the Niger Delta were yesterday hosted by the Abuja Literary Society at a special edition.

Read more: Abuja literary society features women across cultures

The defining experience of Chinua Achebe’s life was the Nigerian civil war, also known as the Biafran War, of 1967–1970. The conflict was infamous for its savage impact on the Biafran people, Chinua Achebe’s people, many of whom were starved to death after the Nigerian government blockaded their borders. By then, Chinua Achebe was already a world-renowned novelist, with a young family to protect. He took the Biafran side in the conflict and served his government as a roving cultural ambassador, from which vantage he absorbed the war’s full horror. Immediately after, Achebe took refuge in an academic post in the United States, and for more than forty years he has maintained a considered silence on the events of those terrible years, addressing them only obliquely through his poetry. Now, decades in the making, comes a towering reckoning with one of modern Africa’s most fateful events, from a writer whose words and courage have left an enduring stamp on world literature.

Read more: ‘There was a Country’ by Chinua Achebe

Chibundu Onuzo is one of Nigeria’s young and emerging literary minds who featured in the just concluded Edinburg book festival. The 21 year-old was in June voted ‘UK’s Best Black Student Of 2012’. She has also been profiled by CNN and The Observer recently named her as one of the Authors To Watch Out For In 2012. While studying history at King’s College London, she made international headlines by signing a two novel deal with U.K. publishing house, Faber & Faber, which has published books by 12 Nobel Laureates and 6 Man Booker prizewinners. Onuzo who has been writing since age ten said ‘The Spider King’s daughter’ was the first novel she completed and “it was very liberating to be able to write ‘The End’”.  She spoke briefly with Weekly Trust.

Read more: I attempted my first novel at 10, says Chibundu Onuzo

At the Edinburgh International Book festival, China Miéville gave the final World Writers’ Conference keynote speech on the future of the novel. The conversation between delegates ebbed and flowed afterwards but one of the most notable remarks came from Jackie Kay, who responded to what she perceived as an atmosphere of gloom about the novel’s survival with bemusement. “Why do novelists so fear the death of the novel?” she asked. “Poets don’t fear the death of the poem.”

Read more: The death of the novel will presage a rebirth of writing