Professor Niyi Osundare

The 6th Niyi Osundare International Poetry Festival (NOIPOFEST) will come up on Monday 27 June 2022, in Ado-Ekiti.

The theme is Pandemic, Lockdowns and the Poet.

The Keynote Speaker will be Professor Saleh Abdul Kwami, while Governor John Kayode Fayemi of Ekiti State is the Special Guest of Honour.

NOIPOFEST started in 2015 in honour of the multiple award-winning Osundare, a world-class poet, scholar and public intellectual who previously taught at the Department of English, University of Ibadan.

Born in Ikere-Ekiti, Ekiti State, in 1947, Prof Osundare was educated at the University of Ibadan, University of Leeds and York University, Toronto, Canada.

His poetry collections include City Without People,The Katrina Poems,  Random Blues, The Word Is an Egg, Midlife, Waiting Laughter’s,  Moonsongs, and The Eye of the Earth, mong others.

Professor Osundare has won awards and prizes, including the Association of Nigerian Authors (ANA) Prize, the Cadbury/ANA Prize, the Commonwealth Poetry Prize, the Noma Award, the Tchicaya U Tamsi Award for African Poetry, and the Fonlon/Nichols Award for «excellence in literary creativity combined with significant contributions to Human Rights in Africa. He received the 2014 Nigerian National Merit Award.

He was a columnist for Newswatch and had poetry columns in Sunday Tribune, the rested NEXT newspaper, and The Nation. His latest works, GREEN: Sighs of Our Ailing Planet and Snapsongs: Home groans and Foreign flares, were released earlier this year.