British-Nigerian poet and writer Theresa Lola has been revealed as the joint winner of the 2025 Derek Walcott Prize for Poetry for her poetry collection Ceremony for the Nameless. She shares the honour with Irish poet Mary O’Malley, recognised for her collection The Shark Nursery.
The Derek Walcott Prize for Poetry, awarded annually by Arrowsmith Press in collaboration with the Derek Walcott Festival in Trinidad, celebrates outstanding poetry collections published in English by non-US writers. The prize honours the legacy of Nobel Laureate Derek Walcott, known for his influence on global poetry.
Published in 2024, Ceremony for the Nameless explores the act of naming and its role in shaping our identities, our aspirations, what we carry and how we belong. Lola conjures and questions the realities of her dual Nigerian-British identity; traces the lineages of names; asks why some deserve to be named while others are treated as though invisible; and explores the ways our journey through life might require us to cast off old expectations – both others’ and our own – just as at other times it can bring us back, strangely and unexpectedly, to where we first began.
Theresa Lola is a British-Nigerian poet and writer. She was joint winner of the 2018 Brunel International African Poetry Prize and the 2025 Derek Walcott Prize for Poetry. In 2019, she served as the Young People’s Laureate for London. Her first poetry collection, In Search of Equilibrium, was published in 2019, and her second, Ceremony for the Nameless (2024), explores the relationship between names, naming, and identity.
Congratulations, Theresa Lola!
Bakare Oluwatobiloba
I write to educate, motivate and define history with literature. Just being me!
