Garlands for the dream-seeker: A poetic celebration of Femi Osofisan@80
By Editor
EMERITUS Professor Femi Osofisan (aka Okinba Launko) will turn 80 years old in June, 2026. Osofisan is a universally acknowledged and multiple-award winning playwright, distinguished scholar, poet, essayist, literary/theatre critic, storyteller, novelist, actor, mythopoeist, biographer, director, songwriter and composer, translator, cultural nationalist, arts administrator, editor, journalist and activist. Prof. Toyin Falola in his book, In Praise of Greatness: The Poetic of African Adulation (2019) writes about him thus:
With over fifty plays, four works of fiction, four collection of poetry, and two books of for junior readers already published, Femi Osofisan has emerged as one of the most prolific contemporary African writers. He is one of the very few highly productive African authors whose works are innovative and original. His imagination, vision and craft distinguish him as a creative writer of the very first rank and one of the few literary scholars yet to come out of Africa… In his home country of Nigeria, he is arguably the most performed playwright with audiences of all different levels enjoying the tour de force of his dramatic composition.
Beyond his literary and scholarly acclaims, Osofisan has played the field fully in the praxis of African and world cultures. He was the founder of Kakaunsela Kompany (1979), founding member and former President of the Association of Nigerian Authors (ANA), long-standing Vice President and member of council, Pan-African Writers’ Association(PAWA), former General Manager, National Theatre, Lagos, winner, Nigeria National Merit Award in Humanities (2006) and first African winner of the prestigious Thalia Prize for International Association of Theatre Critics (2016). Osofisan is a member of the Advisory Board of the International Research Centre at Friere, Universitat in Berlin, Germany, as well as the Chairman, Board of Trustees of the Association of Nigerian Authors(ANA).
Prof. Femi Osofisan
According to the Editors – a former President, Association of Nigerian Authors(ANA), Centre for Creative Writing, Yakubu Gowon University, Formerly, University of Abuja, Denja Abdullahi and poet, literary biographer and critic, Ezekiel Fajenyo, this celebration of Prof. Osofisan is themed around poetry, in which he has been effusively committed but which may have been overshadowed in people’s imagination by his dramatic profundity and prolificacy. Osofisan, using the pen name or pseudonym Okinba Launko, has the following poetry collections to his credit: Minted Coins (1987), Dream-Seeker on Divining Chain (1993), Commemorations (Ire Ni Temi): Poems for Performance (2007), Seven Stations Up The Tray’s Way (2013), Remember Tenderness: New and Selected Poems – Vol.1 (2023) and The Jewellers of Night: New and Selected Poems – Vol. 2 ( 2023). Beyond publishing his own poems, Okinba Launko has also selected and edited poems from other Nigerian writers which he published in the year 2020 titled Mingled Coins: Seventy Love Poems.
We therefore call on interested writers in Nigeria, Africa and across the world to contribute poetic pieces for publication into a book in June 2026, to celebrate someone that has enlivened African and the world literary imagination in his own uncommon ways across various genres. We are specially mindful of pieces that derive from the exploration of the devices of African orature and other world “cultural matrices to make artistic statements” (Falola, 244).The poems can be oracular, incantatory, ritualistic, panegyric, song-like, narrative and all possible in those moulds. The subject matter can be on Osofisan (Okinba Lanko), the man, the writer, his arts, his myths, his influence and any other thing under the sun as long as it showcases the humanity of literary imagination clothed in verbalized cultural expressions in form and content. Submitted poem(s) should conform to the followings: Can be of any length and in any form with a tinge of orature, should be sent as Ms word email attachment with not more than 100- word biodata of the poet to orpheusfoundation@gmail.com not later than March 20, 2026
