Ikeogu Oke opens new AWF season

This comes in the wake of an eventful 2010 literary season which featured readings by national and international writers, creative writing workshops, weekly critique sessions and the publication of Dugwe, an in-house literary journal of writings by AWF members and previous guest writers including Uche Umez, Igoni A, Barrett and Emeka Agbayi. Mr Oke  whose […]

This comes in the wake of an eventful 2010 literary season which featured readings by national and international writers, creative writing workshops, weekly critique sessions and the publication of Dugwe, an in-house literary journal of writings by AWF members and previous guest writers including Uche Umez, Igoni A, Barrett and Emeka Agbayi.

Mr Oke  whose second collection of poems, Salutes Without Guns (2009), was long-listed for the 2010 Wole Soyinka Prize for Literature and selected as one of the Books of the Year (2010) by the Times Literary Supplement (TLS), hails from Akanu Ohafia in Abia State.

Since 1988 his poetry, fiction and scholarly essays have appeared in various publications on both sides of the Atlantic. In selecting Salutes Without Guns as one of the Books of the Year (2010) for the Times Literary Supplement (TLS), Nadine Gordimer, the eminent South African writer and winner of the 1991 Nobel Prize in Literature, said of Oke: “Here is a writer who finds the metaphor for what has happened and continues, evolves, not often the way we want, in our lives in Africa and the world. He does so timelessly and tellingly, as perhaps only a poet can.”.

Oke is also a performance poet with an international track record. On October 14, 2010, his performance of “My Country at Night” was a major entertainment feature at the culminating dinner of the Presidential Retreat for Power Sector Investors held at the State House, Abuja. Prior to that, he had performed at several local and international fora, including the Vodacom Complex, Gauteng, South Africa, where, on May 23, 2008, he performed “A Savage Writes Back” and “The Palm wine Ode” as a special guest of the wRites Associates during the celebration of the 50th anniversary of the publication of Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe.

A product of University of Calabar and the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, graduating with a BA in English and Literary Studies and an MA in Literature, respectively He currently works as a Technical Adviser (Media and Communication) in the Presidential Task Force on Power (PTFP), Abuja.

There will be the usual side-attraction of mini-art exhibition, performance poetry, live music and an improved raffle-draw. Other AWF programmes for the 2011 literary season will be duly announced. The Abuja Writer’s Forum meets three Sundays each month and hosts a reading on every last Saturday at the International Institute of Journalism and Pen and Pages respectively.