Helon Habila (he/him) is a Nigerian writer and teaches creative writing at George Mason University in Virginia. He studied in Nigeria and the UK. He is the author of four novels: Waiting for an Angel (Penguin/Random House, 2002), Measuring Time (Penguin Random House, 2007), Oil on Water (Penguin Random House, 2011), and the latest Travelers (Penguin Random House 2019), about African migrants in Europe.

He is the author of the nonfiction book, The Chibok Girls: The Boko Haram Kidnappings and Islamist Militancy in Nigeria (Penguin/Random House, 2016) and editor of the Granta Book of African Short Story (Granta, 2013). He is a contributing editor to the Virginia Quarterly Review. His reviews, essays and short stories have been published in many journals and magazines including Granta, Guernica, WSJ, VQR, the New York Times and the UK Guardian. His many awards include the Caine Prize, the Virginia Library Fiction Prize, the Commonwealth Prize, and the Windham-Campbell Prize for Fiction. He divides his time between Nigeria and Virginia where he lives with his family.