By Henry Akubuiro
A Nigerian graduate and creative writer, Samuel Felix Ekanem, has been offered five fully-funded scholarships in the United States of America, for an MFA in creative writing.
In addition to the hundred percent tuition waiver scholarships, each of the university has also awarded the 29-year-old fiction writer a graduate fellowship/teaching assistantship role, for which he is entitled to annual stipends all through his study duration.
The offers came shortly before the Nigerian bagged the President’s NYSC Honours Award, which was conferred on him alongside 52 other ex-corps members recently, by the immediate past President, Muhamadu Buhari, GCFR, in recognition of his outstanding performance and intellectual contribution to national development during his one-year compulsory national service in Oyo State– an award that came with automatic employment into the federal civil service and scholarship to doctorate level in any universities of his choice in Nigeria.
The institutions awarding him the scholarships in the United States include the University of Notre Dame, Indiana; the University of South Carolina, Columbia; Florida State University, Tallahassee; North Carolina State University, Raleigh; and Texas State University, San Marcos.
Daily Sun gathered that each university did its best to win him to its programme, including increasing his annual stipends a couple of times, and, in some cases, even reviewing his graduate assistantship role to lure him to accepting its offer.
But Ekanem decided to accept the offer from the highly ranked, prestigious University of Notre Dame, Indiana, which enjoys further reputation as the first ever Catholic university in the United States of America.
Samuel Felix Ekanem was born and bred in Uwa, Akwa Ibom State in Southern Nigeria. A graduate of Communication Arts from the University of Uyo, Nigeria, Ekanem is incidentally his family’s first graduate.
While at the University of Uyo, Samuel served as the general editor of the then university’s maiden student union magazine, The Informer.
On the unprecedented offers, Ekamem told Daily Sun: “I’m elated to have written a story that could take me this far. It gives me so much confidence in my writing, and encourages me to do even better. You need to know how competitive it is to get into an MFA programme. Some of them have one percent acceptance rate; some even less than one percent.
“I previously applied to a few of them, but I only ended up on the waitlist. And since the waitlist did not move, I didn’t make it off there. It took me a whole year to write the stories that I used in the application.”
The writer further explained that his admission into these schools was a culmination of his childhood dream to do an MFA , where he would have the opportunity to hone his creative writing skills and become the writer he dreams to be.
Daily Sun checks revealed Samuel is the only African admitted into University of Notre Dame’s MFA programme in the 2023 admission cycle. The University of Notre Dame has also provided him with a flight ticket to the USA, which, according to Ekanem, was a big relief.
Before now, his literary pieces had been published in The Sun (Nigeria); The Fictional Café(USA); Literary Yard (India), and elsewhere.
On his literary influences, Ekanem poured accolades on award-winning Nigerian writer, Uwem Akpan, whose work, Say You’re One of Them, “met my literary aesthetic taste and gave me unprecedented inspiration when I came across it for the first time years back.”
Besides, “Uwem Akpan uses powerful imagery to drive home his ideas, making his works not only compelling but also empathetic. No wonder his works are so celebrated worldwide,” he said.
Ekanem is set to depart Nigeria for the US next week.