Temienor-Vincent Wins Global Voices Scholarship for Africa

Raheem Akingbolu

Winning a scholarship to study in a higher learning institution is a significant victory for any student, especially when it is a global-recognised school. As with several international universities today, scholarships help distinguish students with exceptional talents or promise in their respective fields of study.

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 Ayọbámi 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.