Adedayo Agarau has been named the winner of the 2026 Nossrat Yassini Poetry Prize for his poetry collection, The Years of Blood.
Housed and managed by the University of New Hampshire’s English Department, the prize honors a first book by a U.S. based poet of exceptional promise, recognizing both the writer and the press behind the work. It carries a $10,000 award, a featured reading at the annual Nossrat Yassini Poetry Festival, and a national spotlight intended to extend the life of a debut collection beyond publication.
Chosen by Cornelius Eady, Adedayo Agarau’s The Years of Blood centers on ritual killings and child abductions in Nigeria, tracing their impact from the pre-democratic era to the present. Set in rural Ibadan, the collection looks at shared trauma and how fear shapes memory.
The poems use dreamlike images to face violence that resists clear explanation. Memory slips and breaks, even as it remains central. Through repeated words and images, the work holds both what was witnessed and the burden of survival.
Now based in the United States, Adedayo Agarau writes from the position of both survivor and distance, returning to themes of loss, absence, and what cannot be left behind. The poems ask what it means to write through grief, and how language can carry what violence tries to erase.
Finalists for the 2026 prize include Nadia Alexis for Beyond the Watershed and Samyak Shertok for No Rhododendron.
Author of The Years of Blood, winner of the Poetic Justice Institute Editor’s Prize for BIPOC Writers (Fordham University Press, Fall 2025), Adedayo Agarau is a Wallace Stegner Fellow ‘25, a Cave Canem Fellow, and a 2024 Ruth Lilly-Rosenberg Fellowship finalist. He is the Editor-in-Chief of Agbowó Magazine and a Poetry Reviews Editor for The Rumpus. He is the author of the chapbooks Origin of Name (African Poetry Book Fund, 2020) and The Arrival of Rain (Vegetarian Alcoholic Press, 2020).
Congratulations, Adedayo Agarau, on your well-deserved win!
