Editors: Nduka Otiono and Funmi Gaji
Submission Deadline: December 15, 2026
“People create stories create people; or rather, stories create people create stories.”
— Chinua Achebe
Stories and human existence are entwined, each compelling and coaxing meaning from the other. As testament to this enduring and primordial relationship, we announce a new literary project: Stories They Forgot to Tell: An Anthology of Nigerian Short Stories to be published in 2027 by Narrative Landscape Press, Lagos. The anthology aims to apprehend the contemporary era of storytelling in Nigeria by bringing together the best of emerging and established voices that reflect the diversity, vitality, and insistence of modern Nigerian imagination in fiction.
Although poetry may be “Nigeria’s most widely practiced and most enthusiastically admired literary genre,” as the celebrated poet Niyi Osundare acknowledges in his endorsement of Unbound: An Anthology of New Nigerian Poets Under 40 (2025), the short story stands as one of Nigeria’s most vital and dynamically evolving literary genres. Its brevity has never meant slightness; instead, it has offered generations of Nigerian writers a flexible, incisive medium through which to capture the country’s shifting social textures, political tensions, and intimate human dramas. The short story is Nigeria’s rugged and agile literary genre — swift, bold, and endlessly inventive, the form that keeps our storytelling pulse alive.
This vitality is evidenced by contemporary collections such as Uwem Akpan’s Say You’re One of Them, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s The Thing Around Your Neck, Igoni Barrett’s Love is Power, or Something Like That, Uche Okonkwo’s A Kind of Madness, Uchechukwu Peter Umezurike’s Double Wahala, Double Trouble, and Chinelo Okparanta’s Happiness, Like Water.
Our vision for Stories They Forgot to Tell: An Anthology of Nigerian Short Stories emerges from a commitment to foreground contemporary short story writers — voices absent from African Stories (2025), Ben Okri’s thirty‑six–story anthology for Penguin Random House’s Everyman’s Library Pocket Classics. As Okri states, his emphasis on “excellence, mastery of form and wide representation of writers on the continent” led him to privilege the “elders,” leaving little space for the inheritors of their legacy: “By the time I was done,” Okri declared at the launch of African Stories in London reported by Toni Kan, journalist and writer, “there was no time for contemporaries. We must respect our elders.” While we share his dedication to honouring the foundational figures, we shine our lens on the dynamic generation shaping the form today.
To this end, we invite submissions of original, previously unpublished short fiction by Nigerian writers. The stories for Stories They Forgot to Tell may be fantastical or realist, abstract or intimate, lyrical or experimental. Writers are encouraged to explore, but not limit themselves to, questions of identity, memory, survival, dislocation and japa, loss and grief, and desire and sexuality. Preference will be given to stories with close attention to craft, voice, characterization, and emotional resonance. We will also consider extracts from novels-in-progress that represent a complete story or episode.
Submission Guidelines
- Submissions must be original and previously unpublished short stories
- Stories should be between 3,000 and 5,000 words
- Submissions must be double-spaced and page-numbered
- Contact information (name, email address, mailing address, and phone number) must appear on the first page of the submission
- A short third-person biography of no more than 100 words should be included
- Preferred file formats: Word doc or docx (please do not send PDFs)
Submission Deadline: December 15, 2026
Submission Email : storiestheyforgottotell@gmail.com
About the Editors
Nduka Otiono is a professor of English and African Studies, and Director of the Institute of African Studies at Carleton University, Canada. His collection of short stories, The Night Hides with a Knife (1995), won the ANA/Spectrum Prize for fiction. Otiono is the co-editor of about a dozen books that include the celebrated anthologies of creative writing Camouflage: Best of Contemporary Writing from Nigeria (2006), We-Men: An Anthology of Men Writing on Women (2208), and, most recently, Unbound: An Anthology of New Nigerian Poets Under 40 (2025).
Funmi Gaji is a writer, researcher, and professional editor. She is the Founding Editor of ArtisansQuill, a platform that champions the craftsmanship of contemporary African writers. She holds a PhD in Literature-in-English from the University of Ibadan, with expertise in Global South literature and literary theory. Gaji, the author of The Script of Bruises (2017), has moderated literary panels across Nigeria. Her poems have appeared in Unbound (2025), and literary journals such as ANA Review, Jalada, Olongo, and Prairie Schooner.
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