From Chinonso Nzeh’s Isele Nonfiction Prize winning essay, “The Slipping Away,” to Enit’ayanfe Ayosojumi Akinsanya’s stirring piece, “An Anthem of a Place,” check out our top ten most popular essays of the year.

The Slipping Away | Chinonso Nzeh

“I like to think that the reason my parents pampered me was a price for this present troubling reality. They were  gentler with me. When I was younger, my siblings often told me that my parents, especially my father, would whip them with a cane over the slightest negligence. But this father never laid his hands on me.”

“The Slipping Away” won the 2023 Isele Nonfiction Prize.

Christmas Fever | Chinonso Nzeh

“I’m scattering. He’s leaving you keeps ringing in my head. I do not check for his messages. I ignore text and emails, including the ostensibly imperative ones from friends (C is asking if I enjoyed reading A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara; N wants to know if I’ll be available next week; F wants me to send him my Spotify Igbo music playlist). On my bed, I roll from side to side, scrolling through my gallery for pictures and videos of us, trying to relive those shared moments.”

New nonfiction from Chinonso Nzeh, winner of the 2023 Isele Nonfiction Prize.

Dear Father, I Write to You From the Land of the Living | Ucheoma Onwutuebe

“I still think of your penchant for ordering the destinies of those around you and I guess it is because you are the first son in an Igbo household. You grew up being deferred to. All your siblings deferred to you. Even your mother, Mama Ukwu, held a certain reverence for you and called you Dede. It was natural for me to follow the order of things, to know your word was final. But over time, I grew an opposing muscle, as if I came to this world to prove to you that man shall not make himself the pilot of other people’s lives.”

New nonfiction from Ucheoma Onwutuebe.

Lagos City Girls Never Pay for Pasta | Adaorah Oduah

“In this game of love, restaurants have become new territories where the perennial battle of the sexes is waged. Conversations swing back and forth, deliberating a universal set of date expectations for all of us to live by. What price point is high or low enough? Who gets to go where? How much do you order? And, most importantly, who pays?”

“Lagos City Girls Never Pay for Pasta” was shortlisted for the 2023 Isele Nonfiction Prize.

How To Speak of a Miracle | Joshua Chizoma

“I became aware of how our world was unfair in expectations, cruel in its demands, so that while it was two people who set out to find a fortune, failure was deemed, automatically, to be the burden of the one person. I found it unjustifiable that even though there were two parties in the throes of waiting, it was one who felt the lack so acutely that they had to paste it on their dressing mirror, as though that kind of thing needed any reminding.”

New nonfiction from Joshua Chizoma.

A Few More Words About Breasts | Gloria Mwaniga

“My breasts come with unnecessary attention, unsolicited advice, endless warnings from aunts, Mama’s friends, female teachers, neighbors, even the hairdresser who hot combs my hair with a red-hot metal comb straight from hot charcoal has something to say on the dangers of breast and other horrible things that will happen to me soon. ‘Just wait, you will see for yourself.'”

New nonfiction from Gloria Mwaniga.

Neither Here Nor There: Muslim Women & Resistance | Izza Ahsan

“The liberal-secular, progressive feminists of the world, instead of focusing on hegemonic bodies that snatch away Muslim women’s agency, shift their focus on to the cloth and the bodies that adorn them. They have endless conversations on headscarf; whether one should wear it, and whether wearing it really liberates, or oppresses them, etc. Who is largely absent from these conversations? Those who wear the veil, themselves. People who have never had to deal with the lived reality of a veil, and the religious and cultural aspects of it, spend excessive time contributing to and even dominating, these discourses, in the process victimising, hijacking, and even criminalising Muslim women.”

New nonfiction from Izza Ahsan.

The Branches and the Wind and the Rain | Zenas Ubere

“The adjective ‘lost’ comes from the Proto-Indo-European word leu, which means to loosen, to untie, or to separate. One can be lost in time, in place, in self, or in all three. In whichever form, being lost begins from a separation from some knowledge one needs. To be lost in place is to lack knowledge of the geographical direction with which to navigate oneself, and this form of being lost seems, to me, to be the easier one: firstly, it can be a shared experience, and secondly, a kind stranger or Google Maps can be of help. But to be lost in self, I consider the worst because it is an isolating experience – so isolating it seems like death. To be lost in self is to be separated from one’s memories, from everything that makes one uniquely oneself.”

New nonfiction from Zenas Ubere.

Flight | Chukwudi Ukonne

“There is something embarrassing about relocating in your late 20s. There is something violent about being uprooted in this way, in attempting to graft yourself into new soil that may not take to you. I imagine Achebe would have described it as he described Okonwo’s exile, like “learning to write with your left hand in old age.” In 2019, around 41 percent of Nigerians said they would like to emigrate. By 2021, that number increased to 73 percent. Everyone you know has either moved, is moving, or is planning to move. Unlike the emigration patterns of the last generation, many are running away from something, rather than towards something.”

New nonfiction from Chukwudi Ukonne.

An Anthem of a Place | Enit’ayanfe Ayosojumi Akinsanya

“And yet we are always laughing. If a tragedy happens in the morning, we will spend the evening TikToking, or jumping on trends, or doling out unsolicited ‘hot takes’, or ‘dragging’ someone on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook. ‘Dragging’ here has nothing to do with queer expressions. It means the sometimes malicious (called ‘call outs’), sometimes humorous (this one is also couched as ‘cruise’), always the sensational affair of wrecking people and their (sometimes already wrecked) images. It is one of the few times we bond, one of the few things over which we push aside our differences and become a single mass of energy. An unbearable, almost unbelievable vignette comes to mind, where we were all united, particularly we the youths of the country, and we died like fowls for it. I would use the simile of ‘cattle’, but even cattle are better protected in my country.”

New nonfiction from Enit’ayanfe Ayosojumi Akinsanya.