Akinwande Oluwole Babatunde Soyinka Hon. FRSL, known as Wole Soyinka, is a Nigerian playwright, novelist, poet, and essayist in the English language. He was awarded the 1986 Nobel Prize in Literature for "in a wide cultural perspective and with poetic overtones fashioning the drama of existence", the first sub-Saharan African to be honoured in that category.
Christopher Ifekandu Okigbo was a Nigerian poet, teacher, and librarian, who died fighting for the independence of Biafra. He is today widely acknowledged as an outstanding postcolonial English-language African poet and one of the major modernist writers of the 20th century.
The Penguin Book of Modern African Poetry is a 1984 poetry anthology edited by Gerald Moore and Ulli Beier. It consists mainly of poems written in English and English translations of French or Portuguese poetry; poems written in African languages were included only in the authors' translations. The poems are arranged by the country of the poet, then by their date of birth. The following sections list the poets included in the collection.
Nigerian literature may be roughly defined as the literary writing by citizens of the nation of Nigeria for Nigerian readers, addressing Nigerian issues. This encompasses writers in a number of languages, including not only English but Igbo, Urhobo, Yoruba, and in the northern part of the county Hausa and Nupe. More broadly, it includes British Nigerians, Nigerian Americans and other members of the African diaspora.
The Noma Award for Publishing in Africa, which ran from 1980 to 2009, was an annual $10,000 prize for outstanding African writers and scholars who published in Africa. Within four years of its establishment, the prize "had become the major book award in Africa". It was one of the series of Noma Prizes.
Syl Cheney-Coker is a poet, novelist, and journalist from Freetown, Sierra Leone. Educated in the United States, he has a global sense of literary history, and has introduced styles and techniques from French and Latin American literatures to Sierra Leone. He has spent much of his life in exile from his native country, and has written extensively about the condition of exile and the view of Africa from an African abroad.
Stewart Brown is an English poet, university lecturer and scholar of African and Caribbean Literature.
Amatoritsero "Godwin" Ede is a Nigerian-Canadian poet. He had written under the name "Godwin Ede" but he stopped bearing his Christian first name as a way to protest the xenophobia and racism he noted in Germany, a "Christian" country, and to an extent, to protest Western colonialism in general. Ede has lived in Canada since 2002, sponsored as a writer-in-exile by PEN Canada. He was a Hindu Monk with the Hare Krishna Movement, and has worked as a Book Editor with a major Nigerian trade publisher, Spectrum Books.
Chief Horst Ulrich Beier, commonly known as Ulli Beier, was a German editor, writer and scholar who had a pioneering role in developing literature, drama and poetry in Nigeria, as well as literature, drama and poetry in Papua New Guinea.
Tanure Ojaide is a Nigerian poet and academic. As a writer, he is noted for his unique stylistic vision and for his intense criticism of imperialism, religion, and other issues. He is regarded as a socio-political and an ecocentric poet. He won the 2018 Wole Soyinka Prize for Literature in Africa with his collection Songs of Myself: A Quartet (2017).
Bakare Gbadamosi is a Yoruba poet, anthropologist and short story writer from Nigeria.
Abdul Rasheed Na'Allah is a Nigerian academic, he was vice chancellor of Kwara State University in Nigeria for 10 years, from 2009 to 2019 when he was appointed Vice chancellor of University of Abuja. He was appointed vice chancellor on 1 July 2019.
Bate Besong (1954–2007) was a Cameroonian playwright, poet and critic, who was described by Pierre Fandio as “one of the most representative and regular writers of what might be referred to as the second generation of the emergent Cameroonian literature in English". He died on March 8, 2007, in a car accident on the Douala-Yaounde highway.
Tade Ipadeola is a Nigerian poet who writes in English and Yoruba. He is a practising lawyer. In 2013 his poetry collection The Sahara Testaments won the prestigious Nigeria Prize for Literature instituted by the Nigeria Liquified Natural Gas (NLNG). In 2009, he won the Delphic Laurel in Poetry for his Yoruba poem "Songbird" at the Delphic Games in Jeju, South Korea.
Kọ́lá Túbọ̀sún is a Nigerian linguist, writer, translator, scholar, and cultural activist. His work and influence span the fields of education, language technology, literature, journalism, and linguistics. He is the recipient of the 2016 Premio Ostana "Special Prize" for Writings in the Mother Tongue for his work in language advocacy. He writes in Yoruba and English, and is currently the Africa editor of the Best Literary Translations anthology, published by Deep Vellum.
The Aké Arts and Book Festival is a literary and artistic event held annually in Nigeria. It was founded in 2013 by Lola Shoneyin, a Nigerian writer and poet, in Abeokuta. It features new and established writers from across the world, and its primary focus has been to promote, develop, and celebrate the creativity of African writers, poets, and artists. The Aké Arts and Book Festival has been described as the African continent's biggest annual gathering of literary writers, editors, critics, and readers. The festival has an official website and a dedicated magazine, known as the Aké Review.
Saraba is a nonprofit literary magazine published by the Saraba Literary Trust in Nigeria. First published in February 2009, it aims "to create unending voices by publishing the finest emerging writers, with focus on writers from Nigeria, and other parts of Africa". It has become one of the most successful literary magazines in and out of Africa.
Rasaq Malik Gbolahan is a Nigerian poet and essayist. With Ọ̀rẹ́dọlá Ibrahim, Malik is the co-founder of Àtẹ́lẹwọ́, the first digital journal devoted to publishing works written in the Yorùbá language. He was the founding Editor-in-Chief of Agbowó.
Waiting Laughters: A Long Song in Many Voices is a collection of poems by Niyi Osundare, published in 1990 by Malthouse Press. The anthology received the Noma Award for Publishing in Africa in 1991. The poems explore themes such as hope, resistance, oppression, and laughter, set against the backdrop of postcolonial Nigeria and Africa. The collection is divided into four sections, each with a subtitle reflecting the socio-political context. The poems incorporate elements of visual poetry, dramatic dialogue, and folklore references.
The Eye of the Earth is a collection of poems by Niyi Osundare, published in 1986 by Heinemann Educational Books. The work was awarded the Commonwealth Writers' Prize for the African poetry book category, and the Association of Nigerian Authors' Poetry Prize in its year of publication. The collection comprises nineteen poems that explore nature, culture, memory, and social justice. The anthology is divided into three sections, each reflecting a different aspect of the poet's relationship with his homeland.
