Kyuka Lilymjok
Kyuka Lilymjok is a writer of great talent. He is the author of The Death of Eternity, The Butcher’s Wife, Bivan’s House, Sieged, Hope in Anarchy, The Village Tradesman, The Lord Mammon, The Heart of Jacob, The Lone Piper and the Birds’ Case and A Journey of Hell to Heaven among other fictional works. As a professor of law, he is author of Law and Practice of Equity and Trust, Environmental Protection Law and Practice, Theory and Practice of International Economic Law, and Nigerian Oil and Gas Industry: Institutions, Issues, Law and Policy.
Kyuka’s novels and novellas are a journey and a party of wits and refined humor. Writing on serious social issues, he writes on these issues in such a comic satirical way that makes his novels and novellas tragicomedies of sort. His choice of themes for his fictional works and his handling of his chosen themes always produce moving good and great works of art that entertain the heart as they engage the mind. There is pace and economy of language in his works as there is depth and density. Writing on African issues, there is always something fresh and exotic in his literary brew that seems to come from the cellar of African gods.
His imagination takes the reader out of his material existence to the spiritual world of ideas where life bears sizzling colors that captivate and songs of both modernity and antiquity that enchant. His imagination is never wasted. Whenever English language the medium of his writing proves too poor to communicate his imagination, he creates thingamajigs to do so. Mainly a writer of prose, we find poetry, drama and philosophy sounding through the works of this writer of great genius. There is poetry in his elegant expression, drama in his sassy dialogues and philosophy in the timeless expressions of his characters. A striking feature of this writer lies in how he stretches literary expressions to their elastic limits and his exceptional use of personification. Under his pen, trees talk and grasses walk. His works might take the head to write, they require only the heart to read. For this writer, every sentence carries a magnet that holds the interest of the reader to the next.