The Future Awards Africa has released its nominee list for a 20th-anniversary edition. The edition is themed “Celebrating the Redefiners: Africa’s AI Generation” and spans 26 categories covering technology, entrepreneurship, music, film, sport and the arts.
Often described as Africa’s equivalent of a Nobel Prize for young people, the awards recognise Africans aged 18 to 35 across the continent. Past winners include some of Afrobeats’ biggest names, among them Wizkid, Davido, Burna Boy and Tems. This year’s ceremony is expected to take place in November at the Balmoral Events Centre in Lagos. The ceremony will feature a first-of-its-kind line-up of five hosts, drawn from five different African countries.
Four Nigerian writers lead the literature field
The literature category features four Nigerian authors with sharply different profiles. Damilare Kuku is among the nominees. Kuku is best known for the short-story collections Nearly All the Men in Lagos Are Mad and Only Big Bumbum Matters Tomorrow. She is joined on the list by Fatima Bala. Bala’s third book, the story collection The Lies We Tell, launched to sold-out events in Abuja and Lagos earlier this year. The launch cemented her place among the country’s rising literary names.
Eloghosa Osunde, author of the novel Vagabonds!, is also shortlisted. She recently wrote a poetic monologue for the launch of the Victoria’s Secret World Tour, which the model Naomi Campbell read aloud. The fourth nominee is poet Peter Okonkwo. He founded the literary platform P. English Literature and has published the collection Escape from the Unseen Dungeons: A Cry for Mercy.
Nominees across all 26 categories are assessed through a process overseen by a jury and an independent audit committee, according to the organisers. The awards were conceived in 2006 by media entrepreneurs Chude Jideonwo and Adebola Williams. They are presented by The Future Project, with Ayodeji Razaq now serving as executive director.
One nominee declines, citing the AI theme
Not every nomination has been welcomed. Writer Somto Ihezue said in a social media post that he had been nominated in the literature category. He asked organisers to withdraw his name, image and biography from the published list.
Ihezue said he had not been told in advance that this year’s awards were built around celebrating writers who incorporate artificial intelligence into their storytelling. He called it “a fact I wasn’t made aware of, until now”. His name does not appear on the published nominee list, and the organisers had not publicly addressed his comments at the time of publication.
The episode points to a wider tension running through this year’s ceremony. An awards body built to celebrate young African creativity is now explicitly framing its flagship edition around artificial intelligence. That technology divides opinion sharply among the writers, musicians and entrepreneurs the awards exist to honour. For some nominees, the AI framing is simply a marketing theme draped over an established prize. Others see it differently. At least one withdrawn nominee says it touches on deeper questions about how creative work is made and credited.
Those tensions are unlikely to overshadow the ceremony itself. Across 26 categories, young Africans from software developers to Afrobeats stars in waiting will compete for recognition. That recognition has historically served as an early marker of eventual stardom, given the list of past winners who went on to global fame. The Lagos ceremony is still weeks away, with attention now turning to whether other nominees raise similar concerns. Some wonder whether this year’s AI framing will prove to be a passing theme, or a lasting shift in how the awards define creative achievement.
Questions over representation are surfacing elsewhere in the region too: in the Philippines, an indigenous community has taken a land and carbon-credit dispute to the United Nations, a reminder that cultural and environmental recognition remain contested well beyond awards season.
