About TFP

The darkest thing about Africa has always been our ignorance of it. 

   George Kimbl
We’ve watched as the (hi)story of African places, things, people, events, and culture(s) gradually lose their aesthetics, bearing and presence to the overbearing weight of globalism and pervasive manifestations of (post)modernism, and how the African future is envisaged with doom and chaos.

Toyin Fálọlá has spent a greater part of his career advancing the African story the African way. We’re set on the same path to reclaiming the African story by blurring the boundaries between History and Literature to reveal what Maya Angelou refers to as not glamorous facts but historical truths about Africa. Hence, The Toyin Falola Prize is LUNARIS’ way of staking a claim that proper African history indeed can be made, especially under self-selected circumstances. Writing is an impossibility turned on its head, and because of this very act, everything previously held impractical in relation to history can be reconstructed.

It is on this premise that we invite young African writers to reach to the core of Africa to make, re-make, affirm, and re-affirm the African (hi)story creatively, and into the Africanfutures.

Now in its third year, for the winner, the monetary value for the Toyin Falola Prize is worth One Thousand US Dollars ($1000) with an invitation to the BIGSAS Festival of African and African Diasporic Literatures at Bayreuth in Germany, while the shortlisted entries are granted the sum of One Hundred US Dollars ($100).

The Prize is created in honor of the Distinguished African scholar and foremost historian, Professor Toyin Falola, whose contributions to the field of African history and culture have continued to place Africa on the map and accord it its deserved recognition. The Prize is meant to honour his endeavours and contribute to the advancement of the richness of African culture, people, myth, history, advancement, and modernity.