Bio
Educated at Ibadan and Syracuse Universities, Tanure Ojaide has published twenty-five collections of poetry, as well as four novels, five short story collections, three memoirs, and fourteen self-authored and co-authored scholarly books. He has won the Association of Nigerian Authors’ Poetry Prize four times (1988, 1994, 2003, and 2011). His other awards include the Commonwealth Poetry Prize for the Africa Region (1988), the All-Africa Okigbo Prize for Poetry (1988), and the BBC Arts and Africa Poetry Award (1988). He was the Winner of the University of North Carolina at Charlotte’s prestigious First Citizens Bank Scholar Medal Award for 2005. In 2016 he won both the African Literature Association's Folon-Nichols Award for Excellence in Writing and the Nigerian National Order of Merit Award for the Humanities. In 2018 he co-won the Soyinka Prize for Literature in Africa. He has won the National Endowment for the Humanities grant, twice the Fulbright Senior Scholar fellowship, and twice the Carnegie African Diaspora Program fellowship. Ojaide is currently the Frank Porter Graham Distinguished Professor of Africana Studies at the University of North Carolina, Charlotte.
What are the ecological / social crises within your region / country?
My writing derives its inspiration, thematic preoccupation, and poetic force from the landscape etched in the memory of my Niger Delta homeland. The environment has changed drastically from an idyllic state to a dystopic setting in which oil and gas extraction has degraded and polluted the environment to an intolerable condition. The different stages of change of the environment have impacted on my poetry; hence my poetry is as much my story as that of the land.