Three Books By Young Nigerian Poets Make The Shortlist For 2022 NLNG Prize For Literature
The Nigeria Prize for Literature 2022 has announced the shortlist of three poets, one of which will go home with this year’s prize money worth USD$100,000.
Su’eddie Vershima Agema's Memory and the Call of Water, Romeo Oriogun's Nomad and Saddiq Dzukogi's Your Crib, My Qibla are the three poetry books on the queue for the coveted laurel which favoured poetry collections this year.
The announcement for the NNLG Prize shortlist was publicised virtually on various social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram to millions of followers in the literary community.
Making the shortlist announcement was the Advisory Board Chairperson, Prof. Akachi Ezeigbo, who was flanked on both sides by two of her board members, Professors Ahmed Yerima and Olu Obafemi.
The prize jury are university professor, E.E. Sule (Chair); poet, Toyin Adewale-Gabriel and performance poet, Dike Chukwumerije.
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| Prof. Akachi Ezeigbo |
According to Ezeigbo, “The books, in alphabetical order, are Memory and the Call of Waters by Su’eddie Vershima Agema. In this collection, There is a consistent use of memory to reflect on life and destiny through the metaphor of water. Nomad by Romeo Oriogun. The collection has a fresh language and a nostalgic engagement with the theme of exile and displacement. And Your Crib, My Qibla by Saddiq Dzukogi. This volume translates tragedy into lyrical poetry with pathos and effortless imageries.
“This year, our International Consultant who will also do a review of the books on the shortlist along with the judges, is Prof. Susan Nalugwa Kiguli. She is a Ugandan poet and literary scholar. She’s an Association of Professor of Literature at Makerere University, Kampala, Uganda.”
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| Su’eddie Vershima Agema |
As teasers, here are excerpts from reviews of the three poetry collections. First is Agema’s Memory and the Call of Waters in AnoteArtHub: “From ‘When traffic lights went out’ in honour of Pius Adesanmi who died in a plane crash to ‘Transition II’ where ‘Our compound is a testament to the earth’s theft/ littered with concrete mounds, pillowed with/ fading names. Forgotten stories,’ Agema mourns the beginning of nightmares in his people’s encounter with herders who are the genesis of ‘earth’s theft’ of his compound. While in ‘Transition,’ ‘these graves are an encyclopaedia/ pages of our mostly forgotten past’, of deaths that occurred naturally, ‘Transition II’ assumes the macabre dance of herders murdering whole villages just to make way for cows to graze:
‘This river, this river…running behind the houses,/ rushes with urgency and waves as I leave/ warning of a time when herdsmen might lead us to Golgotha./ Our ityo, elders stand helpless while my daughter sighs from afar./ I raise a dirge of too many memories filled with holes,/ waiting to be patched when I become the earth.”
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| Saddiq Dzukogi |
Also from TheNews magazine by Nehru Odeh is Dzukogi’s Your Crib, My Qibla: “Still, the pathos in Dzukogo’s poetry not only rings true it is also palpable. The collection is not just about a poet grieving the loss of his child, but a poet betraying strong, haunting emotions, which the reader senses line after line, metaphor after metaphor and imagery after imagery. And the memories that keep bopping up again and again and the sense of loss grip the reader so well that they also feel the poet’s pains and trauma.
“A salient feature of the collection is its polyphony, its multiplicity of voices, the striking manner in which the poet gave his daughter voice in the second section of the book and makes it dialogic. The book is not just about a poet expressing his own feelings but also about how he makes it dialogic, democratic and interactive by making his daughter, who is still alive though dead, express her own feeling.”
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| Romeo Oriogun |
And Romeo Oriogun’s Nomad is described thus:
“Oriogun combines the exploratory intensity of travel poetry with the confessional fidelity of a memoir to paint the journey of a curious child sculpting his truth into questing words across strange and known terrains. The result is a deeply attentive work brimming with wisdom and a power of observation.”
Undoubtedly, all eyes is now on October when the winner will be announced from the shortlist of three poets. Fingers crossed.
Best wishes to the trio, from all of us at The Words Finesse (TWF).
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