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Personal

Richard Ali is a Nigerian lawyer, novelist and poet. Author of the warmly received 2012 novel, City of Memories, Richard was Editor-in-Chief of the Sentinel Nigeria Magazine and was a runner-up at the 2008 John la Rose Short Story Competition. He has been Publicity Secretary of the Association of Nigerian Authors (2011 to 2015). A founding member of the Nairobi-based arts collective, Jalada Africa, he also sits on the board of the Babishai Niwe Poetry Foundation, based in Kampala, Uganda, which runs BN Poetry Award—Africa’s only in-Africa continental poetry prize. He has served as a consultant, holding a public policy-shaping role as Technical Assistant to the Honourable Minister of Interior from 2015 to 2017, working on the Ministry Strategy Group (MSG).

He is the initiator of Engaging Borders Africa—an Open Societies Initiative for West Africa (OSIWA)-supported project which works to mainstream “soft approaches” to preventing and countering violent extremism in the Sahel, working in Nigeria, Niger, Burkina Faso, Ivory Coast, Mali, and Kenya, through the use of stories and film.

He was Programme Manager of the Association of Nigerian Authors Preventing and Countering Violent Extremism (ANA PCVE) programme, which seeks to use literature to counter extremism. A noted expert on issues of violent extremism, he is an alumnus and member of the Africa Centre for Strategic Studies (ACSS) and has participated in several roundtables across Africa. He is also an alumnus of the US State Department’s International Visitor’s Leadership Programme (IVLP). He co-founded Parrésia Publishers Limited in 2012 and practices law in Abuja, Nigeria. His debut collection of poems, The Anguish and Vigilance of Things, was published in 2019 by Konya Shamsrumi.

Literature and the Arts

In March 2008, he was selected amongst 50 other young Nigerian writers to participate in the British Council’s Radiophonics Workshop at Kano, facilitated by Dr. Graham Mort (University of Lancaster). He joined the Sentinel Literary Movement of Nigeria in 2011 and undertook the editorship of fourteen quarterly Sentinel Nigeria Magazine issues. In 2011, at the International Convention of the Association of Nigerian Authors, he was elected as Publicity Secretary [North] and served for four years.

He co-founded Nigeria’s third largest publishing company in 2012. Parrésia Publishers Ltd has published well over fifty books under its two main imprints—Parrésia Books and Origami Books. Amongst Parrésia’s authors over the last eight years have been BBC African Performance Prize and Nigeria NLNG Prize winning Abubakar Adam Ibrahim, Nigeria NLNG Prize winning Chika Unigwe as well as the poet, amu nnadi, who won the 2014 Glenna Luschei Prize. A third imprint, Cordite Books, for crime fiction, was edited by award winning George Mason University professor, Helon Habila—who was also a Parrésia Books author.

Richard has completed a 6-week Residency at the Ebedi Writers Residency Program. He has also attended Chimamanda Adichie’s Farafina Trust Creative Writing Workshop [2013], the Nairobi British Council/GRANTA Creative Writing Workshop facilitated by Ellah Allfrey, Nadifa Mohammed and Adam Foulds (2014), has been a Guest at Writivism Festival (Kampala, 2014 and 2015) and the Ake Arts and Book Festival (2013, 2014, 2020). He had also headlined Ghana Writers Project’s Pa Gya Festival (2020)

Very interested in translations and language, Richard Ali helped work on Jalada’s Translations 01 project which saw a short story by Ngugi wa Thiongo translated into 100+ languages. He has spoken publicly about Arabic as a language bridge between the middle east and Africa and in 2020, he translated one of the maqamats of al-Hariri of Basra (d. 1122) to Naija Langwej as part of Professor Michael Cooperson’s new book of translations—Impostures (NYU Press). He read from this translation at a seminar at Princeton in August.

He lives in Abuja where he practices law at Asia Ahmed & Co amongst several other concerns. He enjoys chess, reading and travelling.