The Curious Mind Of Akinwande Jordan

For Akinwande Remilekun Jordan, stories do not have boundaries.

They can live on a cinema screen, inside a short story, in a poem or within an essay interrogating culture and society.

Now, that wide creative curiosity has placed the Nigerian writer, critic and editor on one of African literature’s biggest stages.

Jordan is Nigeria’s sole representative on the 2026 Caine Prize for African Writing shortlist, where his short story, So Long Now It’s Starting To Look Like Eternity, is competing alongside works by four other African writers.

The five finalists emerged from a record 407 entries submitted from 27 African countries.

But the Caine Prize recognition is only one part of what makes Jordan interesting.

Based in Lagos, he is a film critic, journalist and junior editorial fellow at *Black Film Wire, and previously worked as an editor at *Saharan Style. His criticism has also appeared in 49th Street, What Kept Me Up, Get Unruly and Screen in Transit. His interests range from world cinema and film history to African popular culture, literature, politics, gender and the complicated relationship between art and power.

The Story That Got People Looking

Jordan’s shortlisted story appeared in A House That’s Not A Home, an anthology published by Naira Books in February 2026.

At its heart is something painfully ordinary: a marriage slowly falling apart.

The story follows two University of Lagos professors — one in mathematics and the other in literature. The husband encounters a poem another man has written to his wife and begins searching her inbox. What unfolds is less about dramatic confrontation than the quieter devastation of suspicion, emotional distance and a relationship coming undone.

Editors Haliru Ali Musa and Kingsley Alumona said Jordan’s submission required little structural intervention. What immediately caught their attention was his unusual language, prose with the quality of poetry, and the patient pace with which he handles the complexities of contemporary marriage.

That says something important about Jordan as a writer: *he appears interested not merely in what happens, but in what human behaviour reveals.*

A Writer Watching The Screen

Perhaps the most interesting thing about Jordan is that literature is only one window through which he examines the world.

As a critic, he writes about films not simply as entertainment but as cultural documents. His work engages African cinema, world cinema, representation, feminism, politics and ideology. At Black Film Wire, his recent output has ranged from film reviews to reporting on African film festivals and international cinema.

Away from work, his interests are equally telling: literary fiction, philosophy, obscure cinema, comic books and music.

It makes Jordan difficult to put neatly into the box marked “writer” or “film critic.” And perhaps that is precisely the point.

At a time when younger African creatives are increasingly moving freely between forms, Jordan represents an interesting new voice — one equally comfortable examining a film frame and constructing a literary sentence.

The Caine Prize may have brought his name before a much wider audience, but his body of work suggests he has been quietly building towards this moment.

For Nigerian literature, his shortlisting is significant. For Jordan, it could be the beginning of a much bigger story.