Like any competition,
scholarship boards receive thousands of applications and submissions each year
from which they must shortlist a set of strong applicants. The judges must make
the complex decision of candidates who receive these scholarship awards, and it
is never easy, but they must make a choice nevertheless. Naturally, there are angles
to these decisions and candidates who win almost always tick all the boxes
required for qualification.
For this reason, we
celebrate our very own Nigeria’s Linda Temienor-Vincent. In a recent
scholarship award ceremony held in Norwich, the United Kingdom, on 20th May
2022, she received a rousing ovation as she was called to the stage and
presented with the University of East Anglia (UEA) Global Voices 2021
Scholarship award for prose fiction.
Temienor-Vincent was the
sole winner of this prose fiction writing scholarship on the African continent
and is presently studying creative writing at the prestigious University of
East Anglia. The school’s creative writing course is famed for having produced
Nobel Prize winner for Literature 2017, Kazuo Ishiguro, Booker Prize winners
Anne Enright and Ian McEwan, and other critically acclaimed and prize-winning
authors such as Ayọ̀bámi Adébáyò, Mona Arshi, Tash Aw, just a few to mention.
The university offers
scholarships to students in creative writing courses, which include Prose
Fiction, Biography and Creative Non-Fiction, Scriptwriting and Poetry. To
qualify, Students must be nationals of any country within Africa or were born
in any country within Africa. The applicants with outstanding creative writing
potential receive these scholarships worth thousands of British Pounds in
tuition.
According to
Temienor-Vincent, the Global Voices Scholarship has given her a platform to
improve her writing and storytelling skills and amplify valuable stories
designed for a global audience.
A communication
specialist and writer, Linda Temienor-Vincent’s first eBook titled “This
Journey Called Life” was her entry for the scholarship and is available on the
Okadabooks app. It belongs to the fiction genre. The narrative, engaging and
rich with culture, is set in the mid-western region of Nigeria in the 70s and
tells the story of a rib-tickling young Urhobo man and his transition from a
rural community to Lagos metropolis.
Her understanding of
resilience and transformation amid characteristic upheavals in Nigeria is
profound. Suffice it to say that, in these tumultuous and obfuscating times,
Africa and the world need Temienor-Vincent’s penetrating narrative eye to see
situations.
She publicly started
creative writing in 2018 and is a short story writer who enjoys writing
primarily fiction. Every other type of writing comes second. She has the vision
to build a powerhouse for the writing and development of stories. If there is
one thing Temienor-Vincent would like to change about the Nigerian literary
space, it would be to see Nigerian writers exposed to international platforms
to improve their skills and get their works better appreciated.
In the short term,
Temienor-Vincent, who is working on her debut full-length novel, would like to
get Nigerian writers to tell historical and contemporary African stories in new
exciting ways without losing the spirit of their origin. In the long term, she
wants to see a strong guild of writers fighting to get legitimate funding to
develop writing projects which will keep people engaged and employed, thereby
preserving African heritage.
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