The Nigeria Prize for Literature has revealed the shortlist for its 2026 poetry edition, with three collections selected to compete for the $100,000 award sponsored by Nigeria LNG (NLNG).
The shortlisted collections are:
- Flora’s Love Colony by Tares Oburumu
- Why Does God Need a Gun? by Ogaga Ifowodo
- Unbind Me Now by James Ngwu Eze
The three poetry collections were selected from an initial pool of 223 submissions, which was narrowed to an 11-book longlist announced in July.
Established by Nigeria LNG (NLNG) in 2004, the Nigeria Prize for Literature honours the best book by a Nigerian author. It rotates annually among four genres: prose fiction, poetry, drama and children’s literature. With a cash award of $100,000, this year’s prize was focused on poetry.
The winner of the 2026 Nigeria Prize for Literature will be announced on 9 October 2026.
Meet The Three Shortlisted Poetry Collections
- Flora’s Love Colony by Tares Oburumu
Set in contemporary Nigeria, Flora’s Love Colony discusses how persons are involved in the destiny of a nation and how years of that encounter have resulted in some fatal conditions of disillusionment. This borders between identity relations and ideological displacement. The poems are a resounding rendition of reflective experience whereby a vicarious encounter with the consequence of colonial intervention becomes the bane of post-modernist sense of identity and ideology. It features characters and settings whose references provide a background to the satirical images of taking a continent as a whole through the axis of an imperialist enterprise.
- Why Does God Need a Gun? by Ogaga Ifowodo
Why Does God Need a Gun? is a collection that listens for voices nearly erased, the screams of schoolgirls stolen in the night, the heartbeat of a daughter who refuses to renounce her faith, the refrains of prayers drowned by gunfire. In these poems, the forest becomes both prison and mirror, a place where innocence is hunted and where the question of God is turned back on those who claim to kill in His name.
- Unbind Me Now by James Ngwu Eze
Unbind Me Now is a fierce, unrelenting poetry collection forged in fire, grief, and moral urgency. These poems rise from a country under siege and a world unravelling, where faith is weaponised, silence is deadly, and the earth itself bears scars of human cruelty.
Moving through political violence, ancestral memory, exile, pandemic silence, and ecological collapse, this book refuses comfort and demands reckoning. Yet within its flames live tenderness, hope, and the stubborn belief that voice can still matter.
