Adrian Igoni Barrett was a winner of the BBC World Service short story competition for 2005. His first book, a collection of short stories entitled From Caves of Rotten Teeth, was first published in 2005 and reissued in 2008. In 2014 he was named on the Africa39 list of writers aged under 40 with potential and talent to define future trends in African literature. His father is the Jamaican poet and novelist Lindsay Barrett.

Abubakar Adam Ibrahim (born 1979) is a Nigerian creative writer and journalist. His debut short-story collection The Whispering Trees was longlisted for the inaugural Etisalat Prize for Literature in 2014, with the title story shortlisted for the Caine Prize for African Writing. Ibrahim has won the BBC African Performance Prize and the ANA Plateau/Amatu Braide Prize for Prose. He is a Gabriel Garcia Marquez Fellow (2013), a Civitella Ranieri Fellow (2015). In 2014 he was selected for the Africa39 list of writers aged under 40 with potential and talent to define future trends in African literature, and was included in the anthology Africa39: New Writing from Africa South of the Sahara (ed. Ellah Allfrey). He was a mentor on the 2013 Writivism programme and judged the Writivism Short Story Prize in 2014. He was chair of judges for the 2016 Etisalat Flash Fiction Prize. His first novel, Season of Crimson Blossoms, was published in 2015 by Parrésia Publishers in Nigeria and by Cassava Republic Press in the UK (2016). Season of Crimson Blossoms was shortlisted in September 2016 for the Nigeria Prize for Literature, Africa's largest literary prize.[14] It was announced on 12 October 2016 that Ibrahim was the winner of the $100,000 prize. Ibrahim was the recipient of the 2016 Goethe-Institut & Sylt Foundation African Writer's Residency Award.