When Olakunle Ologunro received the call confirming that he had been awarded the 2025-2026 Olive B. O’Connor Fellowship in Fiction at Colgate University, he went silent on the phone for a few seconds. “And then it hit me,” he told Open Country Mag. “I must have screamed. I think I actually did.”
The Olive B. O’Connor Fellowship, administered by Colgate’s Department of English and Creative Writing, offers recipients a $57,000 stipend, office space, and access to an intellectual community of scholars and writers. Each fellow spends an academic year at the university, teaching one multi-genre creative writing workshop per semester and giving a public reading of their work. The program is designed to nurture promising writers at the cusp of their first major projects.
Previous Nigerian recipients include Chinelo Okparanta, Gbenga Adesina, and Ajibola Tolase.
“Writing and trying to make a living from it can be quite precarious,” Ologunro wrote via email. “Especially when you’re a Nigerian (or international) writer who is living abroad. There are lots of things to worry about, and being awarded this fellowship feels like a cushion against some of those worries.”
A fiction writer and essayist from Lagos, Ologunro’s stories have appeared in Story Magazine, Lolwe, Queer African anthology, and Feel Good anthology. He has received an Elizabeth George Foundation grant, a Tennessee Williams Scholarship for the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, a Juniper Summer Workshop Scholarship, been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and longlisted for the Deborah Rogers Writers Award. He has further been supported by the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts (VCCA), Vermont Studio Center, and Aspen Words, where he was named a 2025 Emerging Writer Fellow in Fiction. He is at work on a collection of stories and a novel, aiming to finish both by the end of the fellowship.
Beyond personal achievement, he hopes for his win to inspire other Nigerian and African writers applying for similar opportunities. “This is fellowship application season for writers,” he said.
