Lola wins Brunel African poetry prize

TWENTY-FOUR-YEAR-OLD Theresa Lola is one the three women announced as joint winners of this year’s edition of the Brunel International African Poetry Prize.

Among over 1000 international entrants for the award, Lola will be getting one of the top three prizes of £1000 each.

Now in its sixth year, the Brunel African Poetry prize was launched in 2012 by Brunel University London for the development, celebration and promotion of poetry from Africa, and is open to African poets worldwide who have not yet published a full poetry collection.

Each poet has to submit 10 poems in order to be eligible.

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The two other awardees are Hiwot Adilow (Ethiopia), and Momtaza Mehri (Somalia).

Ms Lola, now a resident of the United Kingdom, says that winning the prize is “an unwavering highlight.”

“I started writing after being inspired by Nigerian poets I saw during a school trip to the Lagos Poetry Festival when I was 12 years old. So, to win the Brunel International African Poetry Prize feels like I am doing my job and responsibility as a poet and human in putting Africa forward where it rightly belongs,” she says.

Theresa first started writing whilst still at school in Nigeria, encouraged by a teacher who recognised her love for writing.

“Going through the awkward teenage reclusive phase, I wanted to document everything I was observing and started writing what I now know as poetry.

“I was inspired by the way poets articulated and condensed heavy stories and knew poetry was the mode of writing I needed.”

She hopes that poetry prize will open doors that would otherwise be closed, and help her achieve her goal of doing work that benefits the poetry community.

“As a poet, it has definitely bolstered my confidence, and of course sheds more light on the possibility of a poetry career,” she said.

Born in 1994, Theresa Lola is an events programmer, workshop facilitator and accountant.

An alumnus of the Barbican Young Poets programme, she was shortlisted for the Bridport Poetry Prize 2017, the London Magazine Poetry Prize 2016, and won the Hammer and Tongue National Poetry Slam in 2017.

She was awarded an Arts Council/British Council International Development Grant to run poetry workshops at the Lagos International Poetry Festival in Nigeria in 2017.

Ms Theresa has facilitated poetry workshops at St Mary’s University, schools such as Saint Gabriel’s College, Upward Bound Workshops at the London Metropolitan University and as part of Africa Writes Festival Education Programme.

Judges for this year’s edition of the prize are poets and academics: Malika Booker; Kwame Dawes (University of Nebraska); Diana Evans; Mahtem Shiferraw; and chair and founder, Bernardine Evaristo (Brunel University London).

Bernardine Evaristo said some of these poets featured in the past five years are publishing, or about to publish, their first full collections.

“This is an incredibly exciting time in the development of African poetry. We expect that many of the poets engaged in our impactful poetry initiatives will become the leading African poets of the future.

“Many of them are still very young, in their twenties, and we expect great things from them, but also those from poets who are older but still relatively new to publishing poetry.”

Previous winners of the prize include Warsan Shire (Somalia, 2013); Liyou Libsekal (Ethiopia, 2014); Safia Elhillo (Sudan) and Nick Makoha (Uganda), 2015; Gbenga Adesina and Chekwube O. Danladi (both from Nigeria), 2016 and Romeo Oriogun (Nigeria), 2017.