Tanure ojaide biography sample

Tanure Ojaide

A renowned poet, Tanure Ojaide has won major national and international poetry awards, including the Commonwealth Poetry Prize for the Africa Region (), the BBC Arts and Africa Poetry Award (), twice the All-Africa Okigbo Prize for Poetry ( and ), and thrice the Association of Nigerian Authors' Poetry Prize (, and In Ojaide was awarded the the prestigious Fonlon-Nichols Award at the 42nd annual African Literature Association (ALA) conference in Atlanta.

For Tanure Ojaide, "the creative writer is never an airplant, but someone who is grounded in some specific place. It is difficult to talk of many writers without their identification with place. Every writer's roots are very important in understanding his or her work." He has read from his poetry in different fora in Africa, Britain, Canada, Israel, Mexico, The Netherlands, and the United States. Some of his poems have been translated into Chinese, Dutch, Spanish and French. He is currently the Frank Porter Graham Professor of Africana Studies at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte.

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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 (, , , and ). His other awards include the Commonwealth Poetry Prize for the Africa Region (), the All-Africa Okigbo Prize for Poetry (), and the BBC Arts and Africa Poetry Award (). He was the Winner of the University of North Carolina at Charlotte’s prestigious First Citizens Bank Scholar Medal Award for In 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 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.