20,000 Naira Up For Grabs at the LIPFest Poetry Contest—Apply

Poets! Okadabooks in partnership with the Lagos International Poetry Festival has something for you. Read about the festival here.

The Lagos International Poetry Festival would will be publishing an anthology of poems for the first time this year, on the theme “Wide Awake”. Poetry entries are expected to interrogate new frontiers in the fight for social justice, gender and racial equality, sexual identity, and the need for vigilance in a post-truth era. The anthology will feature 20 poets, contributing 1 poem each.

Now, five poets with the most outstanding poems will receive a cash prize of ₦20,000 each, and a chance to read their poems at the opening ceremony of the Lagos International Poetry Festival!

Meet The Judges:

• Dami Àjàyí is a Nigerian poet, medical doctor, and music critic. His first collection of poems, Clinical Blues, was shortlisted for the Melita Hume Prize in 2012. In 2011, he was listed among the “Eight Young Nigerian Poets Whose Poems Delight” on the Sentinel UK Poetry Blog. Ajayi has written short stories that have been published in Nigeria and abroad. He currently provides critical reviews about Nigerian music to a number of online publications.

• Titilope Sonuga is an award-winning poet, writer and performer. She was the winner of the 2011 Canadian Authors’ Association Emerging Writer Award for her first collection of poems. She was shortlisted for the Africa Center Artist in Residency (AIR) program in 2015. Her work has appeared in Brittle Paper, The Great Black North: Contemporary African Canadian Poetry, was translated into Italian for El-Ghibli Magazine, and into German for the Berlin International Poetry Festival.

Deadline for submissions is October 26th.
And on October 29th, the Top 20 successful entries would be announced.
To participate, write one poem based on one of the following themes:
– Social Justice
– Gender and Racial Equality
– Sexual Identity
– The need for vigilance in a post-truth era.

There is no limit on the number of lines or stanzas. Visit https://blog.okadabooks.com/lipfest18/ to submit your entries.

To increase your chances of winning, consider attending one of these poetry masterclasses or workshops. Goodluck