The 11 poets longlisted for the $100,000 Nigeria Prize for Literature 2026, will be feted at the 17th CORA-NPL Book Party on Sunday, August 2, at MUSON Centre’s Shell Zenith Hall in Lagos.
Selected from 223 entries, the longlist notably reunites Tanure Ojaide and Ogaga Ifowodo, both shortlisted, nine years after their near-miss for the same prize.
The event, hosted by CORA and sponsored by NLNG, will also stream live via Zoom, Facebook, YouTube and Instagram from 1pm.
In alphabetical order, the books on the longlist for the 2026 NPL are:
1.Adult Love, by Tanure Ojaide
2.Bakandamiya: An Elegy, by Saddiq Dzukogi
3.Black Passport, by Paul Akpomuje
4.2000 Blacks, by Ajibola Tolase
5.Ceremony for The Nameless, by Theresa Lola
6.Corpus: Animistic Verses, by Ayo Oyeku
7.Floral’s Love Colony, by Tares Oburumu
8.The Origin of Wounds, by Rasaq Malik Gbolahan
9.The Years of Blood, by Adedayo Agarau
10.Unbind Me Now, by James Ugwu Eze
11.Why Does God Need a Gun?, by Ogaga Ifowodo
The Book Party, a literary feast of ideas and life, celebrates the authors and their works for emerging as the very best in the country. It promises to be an afternoon of literary feasting, featuring performances, wining and dining.
A special iteration of the CORA Book Party launched in 1996, it was initiated after a review of the first five years of the esteemed Prize project. The idea is to create a platform through which the public gets to engage with the works considered the best of the usually, over 200 entries per edition of the NPL.
CORA is a group consisting of artistes, art enthusiasts, art promoters and art writers committed to the flowering of all the contemporary arts of the Nigerian, and African people. It has organised, every year since 1999, the Lagos Book & Art Festival, (LABAF), critically described as ‘the biggest Culture picnic on the African continent.’ The 28th edition holds November 16-22 with the theme: “The WORKOVER Starts, NOW”.