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Nduka Otiono
Department of English and Film Studies
3-5 Humanities Centre
University of Alberta Edmonton, Alberta,
Canada, T6G 2E5.
Phone
+1 - 780 - 492 – 7833 (Office)
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POETRY | Nduka Otiono
Nduka Otiono writer, scholar, and journalist, is FS Chia Doctoral Scholar in the Department of English and Film Studies, University of Alberta, Edmonton, Canada, and Fellow, William Joiner Centre for War and Social Consequences, University of Massachusetts Boston, USA. Born in Kano city, Nigeria, he holds a Master's degree in English from the University of Ibadan, Nigeria, where he has been an Associate Lecturer in the Department of English. He was for four years the General Secretary of the writers’ guild of Nigeria called the Association of Nigerian Authors (ANA). A cultural activist, he has served as founding member, Advisory Board of the Nigeria Prize for Literature; Chairman, Publicity Committee of the Nigeria International Book Fair; member, National Committee on UNESCO’s Intangible Cultural Heritage. A fellow of the British Council Cambridge Seminar, Otiono has also been a grantee of the US Department of State’s International Visitor programme,
the French Embassy in Nigeria, and Goethe Institut also
in Nigeria. His first book, The Night Hides with a Knife (Short stories), jointly won the maiden ANA/Spectrum Prize for fiction, while his second, Voices in the Rainbow (Poems), was runner up for the ANA/Cadbury Poetry Prize in 1997. The third, We-Men: An Anthology of Men Writing on Women, which he co-edited with E.C. Osondu, a Writing Fellow at Syracuse University, USA, was hailed by The News magazine as “subject of the greatest controversy in Nigerian literature.” Otiono is also co-editor of Camouflage: Best of Contemporary Writing from Nigeria (2006).
He has been an Associate Researcher for the Chinua Achebe Foundation, and was founding Editor of The Post Express Literary Supplement (PELS), which won Literary Column of the Year 1997 and the first ANA Merit Award in 1998. Before consulting as Literary Editor for NewAge, Otiono was on the Editorial Board of THISDAY newspapers.
Otiono’s second collection of poems, Love in a Time of Nightmares, has just been released in the US.
Interviews/Press clips:
sunnewsonline.com
sentinelpoetry.org
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book | bibliography
Love in a Time of Nightmares by Nduka Otiono.
Maryland, USA: PublishAmerica, 2008. 83pp
Nduka Otiono’s excellent book begins a dialogue between Canadian poetics and the rich resources of Nigerian poetry. His book is a call to North American poets, who should open our ears and then offer our response to this generous engagement with our poetic forms. Africa has much to teach us, and here is an ideal place to learn... Come and listen. You will be enchanted.
Bert Almon, Poet and Professor, Department of English and Film Studies, University of Alberta, Edmonton, Canada“How might we make music in a burning house? Love in a Time of Nightmares shows us how. Lacerating and lyrical, these songs are fragments out of a still raging storm whose other name is Nigeria. Tenderness knits despair and hope together in this daring collection, and the product is the ambiguity that must be the stance of all those who dare sing in the midst of an inferno.”
Ike Okonta, Department of Politics, University of Oxford, UK.
“In this collection, the anecdotal melds with the experiential…We encounter verses that serve as a template for the lyrical, the deployment of narratives and folksy idioms that are enchanting. [The] journey motif flutters from Nigeria to Canada, as the author attempts to bridge borders…Otiono offers us a poetic sacrament.”
The Sunday Sun “Nduka Otiono is a poet of the musical word… His erudition blends seamlessly with the spoken sacred word of the local lore in poetry that is at once memorable and sophisticated. He wrenches love from the Nigerian nightmare with an uncommon touch at the instance and distance of an alien shore. He breaks bold ground in borderless intercourse, a noble feat that conjures up the landscape and dreamscape of Joseph Brodsky and Pablo Neruda.”
Uzor Maxim Uzoatu, award-winning author of God of Poetry“ Here are poems to enter into and live in and live by. The personal, the communal, the planetary inhabit these cosmic collages that stylistically stride from oral structures to the architectonics of the written. Nduka Otiono's poetic stance is that of defiant disruption and truth-telling. Read this book and feel
the pulse.”
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