Niyi Osundare, a Nigerian multiple award-winning poet, has been selected as cover poet and headliner on World Poetry, a magazine of the World Poetry Movement.
According to a Premium Times report, Osundare will feature in the fifth edition of the magazine and is the first African to be so chosen.
Also, a selection of Osundare’s poems will be published in the latest edition of the magazine.
The report says the announcement was made in a January 15 email to Mr Osundare by Cao Shui, Executive Deputy Secretary-General of China’s Boao International Poetry Festival and Deputy Editor-in-Chief of World Poetry.
In his reply, Osundare thanked World Poetry Movement for the honour.
Osundare is a poet, dramatist, linguist, and literary critic. Born on March 12, 1947, in Ikere-Ekiti, Nigeria. He is regarded as one of Africa’s most renowned poets.
He has published over 18 books of poetry, two books of selected poems, four plays, a book of essays, numerous monographs and articles published in over 70 journals and magazines across the world.
He has received many prizes and awards, including the Association of Nigerian Authors (ANA) prize, the Cadbury/ANA Prize (twice), the Commonwealth poetry prize, the Noma Award, Tchicaya U Tam’si prize for African poetry (Africa’s highest poetry award), among others.
The latest book authored by Niyi Osundare, Green: Sighs Of Our Ailing Planet, is set for launch in January this year.
Published by Commonwealth Books alongside Black Widow Press, the anthology is Mr Osundare’s compilation of critical pastoral poems concerning the environment around the world.
World Poetry Movement describes itself as a coordination of organisations and poets: international poetry festivals, educational projects and poetry publishing houses, and more than 2,000 poets from 150 nations on all continents.
Its task is to coordinate and give effectiveness and permanence to the conjunction of international and local projects in all continents, projected towards a multicultural humanity, acting in a synchronized way through actions whose axis is the social projection of poetic expression.
