A wag once said that the biggest room in the world is the room for improvement.
At The Lagos Review we continue to strive to improve – our writing, our writers, our engagement with the ecosystem and place in the literary and cultural zeitgeist.
In 2025, we published 197 essays as well as book, music, movies, art and stage reviews. We also published news on the arts from Nigeria, across Africa and from places as far flung as South Korea, Canada, the UK, Australia and more.
In 2025, two of our writers were commissioned to write for the FT Globetrotter’s new guide to Lagos highlighting our recognition and contribution as cultural arbiters and tastemakers in Nigeria:
- Wilfred Okiche – https://www.ft.com/content/16d60c8c-1453-49c2-8b49-b5ef9c4f58ac
- Toni Kan – https://www.ft.com/content/40f8dbbf-6b3b-4f6a-b0df-c6261b62e426
And our co-founder, Toni Kan emerged 3rd place winner at the annual BCA African Business Book Awards 2025 for his book: Riding the Storm: The Untold Story of Africa’s Response to the COVID-19 Pandemic – https://bcafrica.org/book-awards/ published by Narrative Landscape Press.
We also changed our ownership structure: thelagosreview.ng is now owned and published by The Literary Review of Writers Association, a not-for-profit organisation.
Our giant strides and continuing impact as a premier literary publication in Africa is all thanks to you: our staff, our writers, our cheer leaders and supporters.
As we step into 2026, we are pausing to measure and evaluate our progress in 2025 by highlighting our Top 5 entries for books, music, movies, and essays.
Top 5 Book reviews:
Our top book review for the year was by first timer and our new discovery, Olufunmike Imoiko, who sent us a blistering and scathing review of former military president Ibrahim Babangida’s autobiography less than 72 hours after its publication. Hundreds of our readers flocked to read the review highlighting Nigerian’s enduring fascination with Maradona.
Funke wrote: “Ultimately, A Journey in Service is less an honest reckoning with history and more an exercise in self-justification. It offers some insight into Babangida’s thinking but fails to confront the full weight of his administration’s failures, making it a disappointing, incomplete and highly selective account of his legacy.
Others in the top 5 include Yishau Olukorede’s reviews of Fatima Bala’s Hafsatu Bebi and Aiwanose Odafen’s Tomorrow I Become A Woman; Uche Akumbu’s review of Flying Through Water and Yishau Olukorede’s review of Maik Nwosu’s latest offering The Book of Everything.
Top 5 Music reviews
Regular contributor, Michael Kolawole owned our music review pages in 2025. His pieces were incisive, analytical and magisterial. His piece on Olamide’s self-titled album resonated with hundreds of our readers who read and shared and commented.
Read him: In the end, Olamide the album doesn’t tell any tangible story about Olamide the artiste, the label head, and top industry player. Instead, it feels like an album caught between nostalgia and relevance, unsure of its place in an industry that has rapidly evolved beyond its creator’s old formulas.
The other reviews that make up the top 5 include – Michael Kolawole’s review of – Ayọ Maff’s Prince of the Street and Burna Boy’s No Sign of Weakness. TKO’s review of Burna Boy’s No Sign of Weakness also made the Top 5 with Michael Kolawole rounding things off with his review of Tiwa Savage’s This One Is Personal to cement his standing as TLR’s pre-eminent music critic for 2025.
Top 5 Movie reviews
Our readers’ love affair with movies remains strong and continued in 2025 as they consumed our movie reviews in their thousands.
Brotherly and Sisterly, we are delighted to share that our top movie review of the year was Chinonso Nzeakor’s incisive review of Kemi Adetiba’s To Kill a Monkey of which he wrote: Kemi Adetiba’s To Kill a Monkey has every ingredient that makes for an engaging crime thriller; tension, intrigue, impressive visuals, layered characters, high stakes, tight pacing, heightened soundtracks and narrative density. The themes of power, betrayal, lust, vengeance, greed, corruption, internal conflict and justice are delicately woven into this series
It was followed closely by another review of his for – Devil is a liar and then Precious Nzeakor’s reviews of Baby farm, Chinonso’s review of The Party with Michael Kolawole rounding up the Top 5 with his review of Reel Love.
Top 5 Essays
Our new discovery, Chinonso Nzeakor, blew it right out of the park with his searing and well-argued essay – Chimamanda’s male characters: A parade of villains and “thieves of time which caught the attention of thousands of our readers. It was not just the top essay but our most read piece in 2025.
The overwhelmingly positive reception was a comment on his writing as well as a reflection of the literary community’s fascination with all things Chimamanda.
Read Chinonso: “My primary reservation with this binary polarization of gender into victim and villain, this apportionment of blame in Adichie’s literary works is that it almost denies men their humanity. It adorns men with this ideological coat of perpetrator of female suffering, and within this paradigm, it becomes strange, almost impossible, to even conceive of men as victims of female cruelty.”
Other entries in the Top 5 essays category include –
Maxim Uzoatu for The ghastly murder of musician Israel Njemanze in Lagos, Odueh Dorathy Ngozi for her piece, I Thought I Could Speak French Until I Arrived in France from our Migration and the Writer series, Star Zahra’s for her poignant essay, Poetry and the subconscious: A personal essay on Kwesi Brew’s “The Mesh” and Peju Akande’s reflection on the stage drama – Once Upon an Elephant staged by Peaklane Drama Troupe.
There you have it.
2026 is here and we are doing it all over again from the home to the best writing in Africa.
Editors.
