as London’s Institute of Contemporary Arts, the Swedish National
Touring Theatre and the Halcyon Theatre, Chicago, as well as being
broadcast on the BBC World Service.
Babatunde won the Meridian Tragic Love Story Competition (hosted
and organized by the BBC World Service). He is also a winner of the
AWF Cyprian Ekwensi Prize for Short Stories.
Rotimi Babatunde lives in Ibadan, Oyo State, Nigeria.
His next work is novel on choice, migration and love.
His short story, "The Collected Tricks of Houdini", is currently long
listed for the 2015 Sunday Times EFG Private Bank Short Story
Award, the richest prize in the world for a single short story.
BOMBAY’S REPUBLIC BY ROTIMI BABATUNDE
The old jailhouse on the hilltop had remained uninhabited for
many decades, through the construction of the town’s first
grammar school and the beginning of house-to-house
harassment from the affliction called sanitary inspectors,
through the laying of the railway tracks by navvies who likewise
succeeded in laying pregnancies in the bellies of several love
struck girls, but fortunes changed for the building with the return
of Color Sergeant Bombay, the veteran who went off with the
recruitment officers to Hitler’s War as a man and came back
spotted leopard. Before Bombay’s departure when everything
in the world was locked in its individual box, he could not have
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Le portrait magazine