A Carleton professor has received the inaugural Penguin Prize for African Writing in the non-fiction category for a cultural memoir of the African continent.

“I started writing anecdotes while I crisscrossed Africa . . . suddenly it was 100,000 pages,” said Pius Adesanmi, a professor of literature and African studies said.

Thus the award-winning book manuscript, a collection of essays entitled Africa, You’re Not a Country, was born.

In the collection Adesanmi attempts to unravel what Africa means to him, while stopping at all the major intersections of identity, from decolonisation to Pan-Africanism and Negritude.

“It is finally starting to sink in,” said Adesanmi, whose manuscript will be published by Penguin South Africa.

The goal of Penguin South Africa is to use this award to bring African writing to the forefront of literature, Adesanmi said, making it more accessible and creating a larger readership.

Adesanmi hails from Nigeria, an African literary hotspot that boasts many prestigious international awards.

Adesanmi said that while Nigerians have previously won the Nobel, Caine, Orange, and Man Booker awards, they had yet to receive any international acclaim for writing in non-fiction.

His inaugural Penguin Prize was greeted with a “national hunger” to fulfill the non-fiction element of literature, Adesanmi said.

“This is being made a Nigerian thing,” Adesanmi said.

In 2001 Adesanmi won the Association of Nigerian Authors Poetry Prize for his volume of poetry The Wayfarer and Other Poems. This award set him apart from other African writers and though he said it was a great foundation, the success is nothing compared to his experience with Penguin.

“Then, I was only in Nigerian media,” he said. “This is international,” Adesanmi said.

While working on a second non-fiction book and studiously writing a novel, Adesanmi will continue to teach at Carleton this fall. He is teaching an Introduction to African Literature and Postcolonial Francophone Literatures this term.

Adesanmi said he has lived the cultures of his teachings and puts his experience fully behind his writing and teaching.

“I become the theory I teach.”