Funso Aiyejina

By Nehru Odeh

Funso Aiyejina, an award-winning, Nigerian writer, poet, playwright and academic has died. He died on Monday, July I in his sleep in the West Indies.

He was a former Dean of Humanities and Education at the University of the West Indies (until his retirement in 2014)

Aiyejina who until his death was Professor Emeritus at the University of the West Indies, was a multiple award-winning writer known for works such as “Letter to Lynda and Other Poems” which won the Association of Nigerian Authors Prize in 1989.

His collection of short stories, “The Legend of the Rockhills and Other Stories”, won the 2000 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, Best First Book (Africa).

In 2022, he and Merle Hodge were joint winners of the Bocas Henry Swanzy Award for Distinguished Service to the Caribbean.

Described in the 1999 publication of “The Penguin Book of Modern African Poetry” as “one of Nigeria’s finest satirists”, he was a widely published critic of African and West Indian literature and culture.

He was famous for his work on the writing of Earl Lovelace, having been the editor of “A Place in the World: Essays and Tributes in Honour of Earl Lovelace @ 70” and Earl Lovelace: Growing in the Dark (Selected Essays). He was the author of the 2017 biography of Earl Lovelace.

Aiyejina was also the editor of “Self-Portrait: Interviews with Ten West Indian Writers and Two Critics” and co-editor (with Paula Morgan) of Caribbean Literature in a Global Context.

His play “The Character Who Walked Out on His Author” has been performed in Trinidad and Tobago, Jamaica and Nigeria.

Born in 1949 in Ososo, Edo State, Nigeria, Aiyejina graduated from the University of Ife (now Obafemi Awolowo University) in Nigeria, Acadia University, Wolfville, Nova Scotia, in Canada, and the University of the West Indies, St Augustine, Trinidad.

He taught for more than a decade at Obafemi Awolowo University. He also taught at the University of the West Indies in Trinidad & Tobago for more than two decades (between 1990 and 2014). In 1995–96, he was a Fulbright Lecturer in Creative Writing at Lincoln University in Jefferson City, Missouri. He was also Deputy Festival Director of the NGC Bocas Lit Fest.