The 2017 NLNG Prize dozen
Recently, Nigerian Liquefied Natural Gas, NLNG released a long list of eleven poets for the 2017 Nigeria Prize for Literature. The list has drawn a mixed reaction from observers of the literary scene. With one woman contesting against 10 strong men, one c
Arts and Ideas
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
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 Programmehas 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 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.
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.