The Lagos Arts and Book Festival 2025, with the theme “CHANGE: Imagining Alternatives,” runs in West Africa’s largest city from November 10 – 16, 2025.
The Lagos Book & Art Festival, popularly known as LABAF, is an annual arts festival founded by the Committee for Relevant Art (CORA), a Nigerian-based cultural organisation, in 1999. They have been hosting activities like musical performances, book readings and launches, film screenings, a publishers’ forum, book and art exhibitions, panel discussions, symposia, cultural exhibitions, and much more. Many of the leading names in the Nigerian and wider African literary community have been hosted at this storied gathering.
The 2025 edition is set to be hosted at two venues – Freedom Park on Hospital Road (by Broad Street|), Lagos Island, and the JRandle Centre for Yoruba Culture and History, at Onikan, Lagos Island, from November 10- 16.
“Our subject, this year, is primarily inspired by the need to encourage new processes to transform our society into a productive, knowledge economy as we progress through the second quarter century of the world’s fourth largest democracy. The 62-programme of events during the festival hopes to show several points of light in a dark, pessimistic world headlined by Herdsmen killings, Boko Haram sit-ins, and other convulsions in the polity that unsettle us all. Can we all, through books, imagine a world of better possibilities? LABAF 2025 will be spotlighting novels, non-fiction narratives, and dramas in which hope, doggedness, and the will to win, is a key subject,” said festival director Jahman Anikulapo.
There will be panel discussions on politics, culture and society, and Literature in the Digital Age (AI, etc). There will be 10 BookTreks (book chats) on fiction, drama, poetry, nonfiction, supported by grants from the Hawthornden Foundation, a Green Festival for children and pupils, open mics, poetry competition, CORA Youth Creative Clubs, visual events/exhibitions, performances of drama, dance, poetry, film screenings, and literary parties. The winner of the Kayode Aderinokun Poetry Prize will also be announced.
To keep up with the happenings in Lagos this month, we recommend their website; you can also follow them on Instagram.
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