The 2017 NLNG Prize dozen

Peter Akinlabi: Iconography Peter Akinlabi is no stranger to award shortlists.  In 2001 he was shortlisted for the Okigbo Poetry Prize and was also shortlisted for the Brunnel Poetry Prize. His taste of victory came in 2009 when his poem, Moving, won him the Sentinel Literary Quarterly Poetry Competition. Ogbomoso born, Akinlabi earned his stripes […]

Peter Akinlabi: Iconography

Peter Akinlabi is no stranger to award shortlists.  In 2001 he was shortlisted for the Okigbo Poetry Prize and was also shortlisted for the Brunnel Poetry Prize. His taste of victory came in 2009 when his poem, Moving, won him the Sentinel Literary Quarterly Poetry Competition.

Ogbomoso born, Akinlabi earned his stripes with a degree in English from the University of Ibadan and a Masters’ in Literary Studies from the University of Ilorin.

Akinlabi is longlisted for his poetry collection Iconography. Describing his writing method in a previous interview, Akinlabi said, “I am a snailman in the sense that I really never finish writing a poem; I keep chipping off or adding new elements – syntactic or line realignments , a lot of sculptural reviewing, until the poem is out, after which I become sad again in dissatisfaction”

Obari Gomba: For Every Homeland

Obari Gomba is a poet and playwright who teaches in the Department of English Studies at the University of Port Harcourt. Like fellow academic, Ekwuazi above, Dr. Gomba is no stranger to the NLNG Prize having been longlisted in 2013 for his collection Length of Eyes. Now the fellow of the Iowa Writers’ Programme has returned with his new collection, For Every Homeland, with which he hopes to coast to victory in October when the winner of the prize will be announced. 

Gomba, who has been called an “Angry poet” and “activist poet” studied at the University of Nigeria and theUniversity of Port Harcourt,  he currently teaches Literature and Creative Writing. He also has an impressive list of published poetry collections in his kitty, including Pearls of the Mangrove, George Bush and Other Observations, Canticle of a Broken Glass and Length of Eyes.

Gomba is insistent that poetry must speak to real issues.

“The poet’s primary responsibility is to write poetry. However, the poet is human; and he lives in the world. The poet is not marooned in the moon or in the stars or in the sun or in any of the other planets. If the poet is marooned in any of such places, he will find that scientific inanity, pollution and global warming are coming to him…launched at him from the activities on earth. This is how it all falls in place. The poet cannot ignore life because life kisses and bites him every day,” he is quoted as saying in an interview with fellow poet, Uche Peter Umez.

Ogaga Ifowodo: A Good Mourning

Next on the list is an academic turned administrator. Dr. Ogaga Ifowodo used to teach poetry and literature at the Texas State University, San Marcos in the United States. That was before his appointment as a commissioner of the Niger Delta Development Commission last December by President Muhammadu Buhari.

The lawyer, and activitist  led protests as a University of Benin student in 1989 against Gen. Ibrahim Babangida’s Structural Adjustment Programme- has authored no less than four poetry collections including, Homeland and Other Poems, Madiba, The Oil Lamp and A Good Mourning. And he has had a short fiction published in AGNI

Memoirs of his preventive detention under Nigeria’s erstwhile military dictatorship, excerpts from which have been featured in Gathering Seaweed: African Prison Writing (Heinemann), New Writing 14 (Granta) and African Writing, is also in progress. 

He has also authored scholarly works like History, Trauma, and Healing in Postcolonial Narratives (Palgrave Macmillan). He holds an MFA and a Ph.D from Cornell. His venture into politics was shortlived when in 2015 he failed to win the All Progressive Congress House of Representative ticket in the 2015 general elections. He will hope to have better luck with the NLNG Prize in 2017.

Hyginus Ekwuazi: One Day I’ll Dare to Raise My Middle Finger at the Stork and the Reaper

Is a veteran poet. An academic and administrator with a slue of awards on his belt. And he is no stranger to the NLNG Prize either having been shortlisted for the prize in 2009, the year the prize was not awarded.

Dr Ekwuazi teaches at the Theatre Arts Department of the University of Ibadan and has been prominent behind the scenes in the movie industry having been the founding DGof the National Film Institute. He also maintains a sit on the board of the Africa Movie Merit Award.

Ekwuazi has published several poetry collection, and has won numberous ANA awards for his brilliant poetry. Some of his poetry collection include Love Apart, Dawn into Moonlight, Monkey Eyes and That Other Country.

But he has also dabbled into other genres, pushing out a play and a children’s story. He is one poem whom one can say suffer from chronic prolificism as he himself said, “If I collect all the poems that I gave out, it would be more than a collection. I would write and give to friends just like that. I wrote a lot of poems and would not [keep it], you know what I am trying to say. I was just writing, there was no thought of publishing them. I was just writing….”

The academic will have hopes of striking gold this time with his longlisted collection, One Day I’ll Dare to Raise My Middle ​​​​​​Finger at the Stork and the Reaper,  after the disappointment of 2009.

Ebi Yeibo: Of Waters and the Wild

Bayelsa-born Ebi Yeibo also makes the list of 11. He too like most others on the list is a veteran with half a dozen poetry collections to his name. A Song for Tomorrow (2003), Maiden Lines (2004), The Forbidden Tongue (2007), Shadows of the Setting Sun (2012) and The Fourth Masquerade (2014) which won the 2014 ANA prize for poetry and his latest, Of Waters and the Wild. Yeibo, who teaches English at the Niger Delta University hopes this collection will fetch him a bigger windfall than his 2014 effort.

Seun Lari-Williams: Garri for Breakfast

Seun Lari-Williams is a lawyer. While studying law at the University of Lagos, he ended up becoming the president of the Law Society. His collection of poems, Garri for Breakfast touches on a number of themes, including love, and hunger in the corporate world.

Seun says his goal is to be one of those who make poetry “lovable” to the generality of Nigerians and his poetry collection took him about a decade to compile.

“I’ve been writing poems since I was 7 or so. Thus, even though the poems in Garri for Breakfast were all probably written within the last 4 or 5 years, I believe it will be more accurate to say that it took much longer. Perhaps 10 years,” he said in an interview with Lawyard earlier this year.

He will be hoping that with the NLNG win, there won’t be garri for breakfast any more.

Jumoke Verrissimo: The Birth of Illusion

Jumoke Verrissimo brings some excitement to this year’s longlist. She is the only female in a list of 11. She is a young poet, and in a list such as this, this fact becomes even more glaring but she is a young poet who has the battle scars of a veteran.

And yet The Birth of Illusion is only her second collection. The first was 2008’s I am Memory, which was published to critical acclaim and cemented Verrissimo’s place in the pantheon of Nigeria’s fine poets. Since the publication of that book she has made appearances on the award circuit. She has won the Carlos Idzia Ahmad Prize, First Prize for a first book of Poetry, 2009: Anthony Agbo Prize for Poetry, 2009, Second Prize for a first book of Poetry, Honourable Mention Association of Nigeria (Poetry), 2009, Recipient, Chinua Achebe Centre Fellowship, 2012, Mother Drum Golden Award for Excellence, for poetry, 2012.

But Verrissimo, Lagos born and bred, is well aware of her place and that of Nigerian poets.

“I love to think that poets, older and younger generation, source from the same tradition but represent differently, with a large influence from the media and socio-political environment of the time. We could say, the poetry of the different generations speaks into their time, and today, we are informed by a publishing that does parallel processing of ideas, that are written by us, but owned by all. The poets-Soyinka and Okigbo-wrote under strong influence of two cultures, the one they were born into (indigenous) and the other one molded their birth culture and developed perspectives, which were also influenced by the social happenings at their time,” she said.

Seun Lari-Williams: Garri for Breakfast

Seun Lari-Williams is a lawyer. While studying law at the University of Lagos, he ended up becoming the president of the Law Society. His collection of poems, Garri for Breakfast touches on a number of themes, including love, and hunger in the corporate world.

Seun says his goal is to be one of those who make poetry “lovable” to the generality of Nigerians and his poetry collection took him about a decade to compile.

“I’ve been writing poems since I was 7 or so. Thus, even though the poems in Garri for Breakfast were all probably written within the last 4 or 5 years, I believe it will be more accurate to say that it took much longer. Perhaps 10 years,” he said in an interview with Lawyard earlier this year.

He will be hoping that with the NLNG win, there won’t be garri for breakfast any more.

Ikeogu  Oke: The Heresiad

Ikeogu Oke is the author of several collections including Where I was Born (2003), Salutes without Guns (2009) and In the Wings of Waiting (2012). Salutes without Guns was a Times Literary Supplement (TLS) Book of the Year (2010). The book earned a strong endorsement from 1991 Nobel Prize winner Nadine Gordimer. But it is for his latest effort, The Heresiad, a long epic poem that Oke has been longlisted for the NLNG Prize.

Oke is passionate about poetry and has been actively working on getting young people reading and engaging with poetry. In 2013 he published a poetry collection for children, Song of Success, complete with a CD to make poetry more accessible to young ones.

For Oke, poetry and art in general must serve a grand purpose.

“Art for art’s sake is a redundant categorisation because it denotes nothing in reality. Every work of art is produced for a purpose and not to serve its own insular ends as suggested by the phrase “art for art’s sake”. The profundity of what Chinua Achebe said in response to that categorisation, derived from Igbo cosmology, that if one thing stands another stands by it, becomes more luminous the longer one contemplates it,” the Abuja-based poet told Uche Umez in an interview.

Oke, who is also a public commentator, is currently the Media Adviser to the Chairman, Presidential Task Force on Power (PTFP).