Literature Self–publishing victory

Stories are means of transport: to read is, in a way, to travel after all . . . Lets move from stories of defeat to victory.
As a boy in Nigeria during the 1970s, novelist Helon Habila started reading to shelter himself from the turbulent reality of his country at the time, and he first emerged as a writer during "perhaps the worst period of corruption the country had seen," the brutal reign of General Sani Abacha. But, in an interview with Frank Bures for Poets & Writers magazine, Habila says he learned So much ... So much from writers such as Chinua Achebe and Ben Okri. They were the pioneers, and they showed us that we could do it. They made the way for us, for the younger generation to follow.
But Habila's writing is quite different from A lot of postcolonial African fiction, which is caught up in anticolonial themes. He also notes that Habila came up with a novel way to get attention for his first book, which was self–published. He submitted it for the $15,000 Caine Prize for African Writing by posing as his own publisher — which he was, and "when the Caine Prize committee wrote back to tell Habila's publisher that he'd been shortlisted, [Habila] replied anonymously. 'Thanks for your mail. We'll let the author know of the good news immediately. We hope that God will guide the judges in their choice.' He subsequently won.
· Hope & Moby Lives [PublisherWeekly]