Tanure Ojaide to receive honorary doctorate degree at Delta State University, Abraka
By Editor
PROFESSOR Tanure Ojaide has been nominated to receive the award of Honorary Doctorate Degree at Delta State University, Abraka at the university’s 17th Convocation. The event will be held on April 26, 2025.
The nomination letter from the Deputy Registrar of the universiy, Dr. O.M. Agbawe, says, “The high point of the (convocation) ceremony is the conferment of Honorary Doctorate award on distinguished persons who have excelled and contributed immensely to the development of the society. Consequent on the above, the Joint Council/Senate Committee on Honorary Degrees at its meeting held on Thursday, January 30, 2025 nominated you (Prof. Tanure Ojaide) for the award of honorary degree of Delta State University, Abraka.”
Prof. Ojaide teaches English at Department of Africana Studies of the University of North Carolina-at-Charlotte, US. Ojaide is a notable Nigerian poet from the Niger Delta region. As a writer, he is noted for his unique stylistic vision and for his intense criticism of imperialism, religion, and other issues. He is regarded as a socio-political and an ecocentric poet.
Ojaide has won major national and international poetry awards, including the Commonwealth Poetry Prize for the Africa region (1987), the BBC Arts and Africa Poetry Award (1988), the All-Africa Okigbo Prize for Poetry (1988 and 1997), the Association of Nigerian Authors’ Poetry Prize (1988, 1994, 2003 and 2011) and the Fonlon-Nichols Award.
In 2016, Ojaide won the Nigerian National Order of Merit (NNOM) award, the apex and the most important award for scholastic excellence in Nigeria. In 2017, his poetry collection, Songs of Myself: A Quartet, was among the three finalists for The Nigeria Prize for Literature (Oke Ikeogu and Dr. Ogaga Ifowodo being the other two, with Ikeogu winning the covted prize). Three conferences have also been convened in his honour. The most recent one was held in May 2018 at the University of Port Harcourt.
Songs of Myself was shortlisted for the biennial Wole Soyinka Prize for Literature in Africa, alongside collections by Harriet Anena and Servio Gbadamosi, and on December 9, 2018, at an award ceremony held in Lagos, Ojaide and Anena were announced as joint winners, chosen by judges that included Prof. Toyin Falola, Prof. Olu Obafemi and Margaret Busby, with the presentation being made by Professor Wole Soyinka.
Ojaide has over 20 collections of poetry, a genre where he is most prolific. he has also done well in prose, with more than seven offerings both as novels and short story collections. Ojaide also has non-fiction works to his name including critical works as a professor on African studies in teh global north.
Prof. Tanure Ojaide
Some of his poetry works areTo Those Who Love Me (Ibadan: Bookcraft, 2022), Narrow Escapes: A Poetic Diary of the Coronavirus Pandemic (Lakewood: Spears Media, 2021), The Questioner (Ibadan: Kraft Books, 2018), Songs of Myself: A Quartet (Ibadan: Kraft Books, 2015), Love Gifts (Lagos: African Heritage Press, 2013), The Beauty I Have Seen (Lagos: Malthouse, 2010), Waiting for the Hatching of a Cockerel (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 2008), The Tale of the Harmattan (Cape Town: Kwela Books, 2007), In the House of Words (Lagos: Malthouse Press Ltd, 2005) and I Want to Dance and Other Poems (San Francisco: African Heritage Press, 2003).
In prose, Ojaide’s offerings include God’s Medicine Men and Other Stories (Lagos, Nigeria: Malthouse, 2004), God’s Naked Children (Lagos: Malthouse, 2018), Stars of the Long Night (Lagos: Malthouse, 2012),The Old Man in a State House & Other Stories (Lagos: African Heritage Press, 2012), Matters of the Moment (Lagos: Malthouse, 2009), The Debt-Collector and Other Stories (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 2009), The Activist (A Novel) (Lagos: Farafina Publications, 2006) and Sovereign Body (A Novel) (Spring, TX: Panther Creek Press, 2004).
