Helon Habila Oil on Water

Oil on Water is a 2010 novel by Helon Habila, who originally worked as a journalist and poet in Nigeria before becoming a professor of creative writing at George Mason. His writing has earned many accolades, including the Music Society of Nigeria national poetry award, the 2001 Caine Prize, the 2003 Commonweath Writers Prize, the 2008 Emily Balch Prize, and the 2015 Windham-Campbell Prize for Fiction. Oil on Water is his third novel, and foregrounds Habila’s unique ability to weave journalistic endeavors into magical prose to elicit strong responses in the reader. Habila uses his main characters Rufus and Zaq, journalists piecing together the story with the reader, to illustrate how the global oil economy wreaks environmental and social havoc on the Niger Delta.