Ogaga Ifowodo, winner of this year’s $100,000 Nigeria Prize for Literature, has proposed that organisers also pay the writers who do not win.
The poet, who won the Prize for his collection Why Does God Need a Gun, used his post-ceremony interview to propose that organisers introduce consolation prizes for the writers who come close but do not win.
“I think it’s time NLNG introduced a consolation prize,” he said. “This is long overdue.”
Ifowodo was one of three finalists seated at the same table when the winner was announced. He described the tension as palpable, and said it grew as the advisory board chairperson, Prof Akachi Adimora-Ezeigbo, drew out the announcement.
Ifowodo, who said he was calm throughout, added that he told himself “there are three people left. It’s going to be one of them”. He had even rehearsed a losing scenario, he said, joking that he would simply ask whichever fellow poet won to buy him a bottle of beer in consolation.
The composure slipped briefly. “For a moment, I was a little bit tense,” he said. “That’s when I put my head down.” It did not last. For Ifowodo, who has been shortlisted for the prize before without winning, the wait ended in a win he called both a financial and a personal vindication.
He has entered the competition three times. Asked whether he would enter again, he joked that there would be “a moratorium” until the $100,000 runs out.
It was the drama of the ceremony itself that prompted his proposal. Having three finalists wait on stage for one name to be called, he suggested, is needlessly harsh on the other two.
“If they don’t want to do a consolation prize, they shouldn’t bring the other two,” he said. He suggested the organisers could instead announce the winner ahead of time, as is done for the Nigeria Prize for Science, so that only the winner attends. “Don’t just bring all three of them there,” he said. “Take us to the ring, literally. And then the three of us are there, like we are being wrecked over the coast.”
Then he turned to arithmetic. “Even if it is just $5,000,” he said of what finalists might receive. “This is my proposition. My proposal.”
His sums, delivered live, went like this. At the longlist stage, he proposed a smaller award for each of the writers who did not make the shortlist, floating figures of $5,000 or $3,000 each. Eight writers at $5,000 each would cost $40,000; at $3,000, $24,000. “That’s nothing to end up with,” he said.
At the shortlist stage, he proposed that the runners-up receive a minimum of $10,000 each, or $20,000 in all. Add the $100,000 for the winner and the longlist payments, and the full prize pot comes to about $160,000.
“What is that?” he asked. “That can be done.”
Ifowodo was keen to stress that the existing prize is already substantial. Comparing it with the TS Eliot Prize in the United Kingdom, one of the most coveted poetry awards in the English-speaking world, he noted that the British prize is worth £25,000, roughly $33,000. “This prize is three times that amount,” he said.
He made clear that the money is only part of what a prize offers. “Prizes may even be small in price, but in terms of what they do to validate you as a writer, as an artist, sometimes it can even be more valuable than the actual amount of money,” he said.
He described the experience as a “double shot in the arm”: the first from being the last writer standing out of 223 entries, the second from winning. “You say, ‘Yes, I can keep writing.'”
He also warned against writing for prizes. “If your only motivation to write is to win a prize, you are not a writer,” he said, quoting the Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka’s idea that a writer is either “born to his art or not.”
Why Does God Need a Gun is built around Leah Sharibu, the schoolgirl abducted from Dapchi, Yobe State, who was reportedly refused release because she would not renounce her Christian faith. Ifowodo gives her a voice in the collection and describes her as “a composite figure of all the victims of terrorism,” including the Chibok girls and the boys killed at the Federal Government College, Buni Yadi.
“There was no way I was going to let Boko Haram or the Islamic State of West Africa Province succeed in perpetually silencing her,” he said.
He said his only reservation while writing was whether the poet-persona could plausibly think and feel what he imagined for her, given her age and isolation in the forest. He relied on public accounts from freed captives, including details such as the mother washing clothes, and imagined the rest.