Femi Morgan explodes with The Year of Fire

FEMI Morgan, a Nigerian writer, media consultant, and arts curator has a new offering to the national and international reading public. The Year of Fire is a collection of poems published by Baron’s Cafe, an imprint of Fairchild Media.

  The Year of Fire explores rage and anxiety in national and cosmopolitan Nigerian spaces. The book engages the current poetic mutations where oralist and modernist styles are moulded into verses that reach the senses within and beyond the frame of Nigerian poetic tradition. The poems are bold, clear, thoughtful, visible, and tangible.

  The poems on Oshodi assert a time frame for the collection. Part of the collection was curated when the writer took his observer’s brush to listen to the colours of the language of the suburbs. Other poems are markers of this poetic engagement that resonate with the period of the Covid-19 lockdown.

  Morgan has written six books of poetry: Silent Drummings (2008), Poetry of People (Eds 2015), Song of Travel (2016), Whispers (2019), Renegade (2019), and The Year of Fire (2020), which was first published internationally within a collective of Black poets and writers. The book can be found on Amazon as well as on the Baron’s Cafe website. 

  All previous works have received critical reviews, and contributed to poetry subgenres, and have relatively become markers of time, landscape and age.

  Morgan was longlisted for the Babishai Niwe Poetry Foundation Prize in 2015 and was selected for the Writivism Poetry Workshop in the same year. He is also the author of Renegade, which was shortlisted for the 2019 Pius Adesanmi Memorial Prize for Literature, selected amongst the 2019 Lagos Book and Arts Festival books (LABAF), and is currently being translated to Portuguese. A restless being for culture advocacy, Morgan has also curated art and culture projects for more than 10 years. He is married to a chef; they live on the edge of Lagos, Nigeria.