Nigeria's literary icon Gabriel Okara dies at 97

bbc

Tributes have been pouring in for famous Nigerian poet and novelist Gabriel Okara who has died at the age of 97.

Local newspaper Vanguard says Mr Okara from Bayelsa State in southern Nigeria died on Sunday evening after collapsing, a month before his 98th birthday.

The paper says Okara, referred to as the "Nigerian negritudist", was the first modernist poet of Anglophone Africa and was famous for his first novel, The Voice, published in 1964.

The Sun reportsthat his literary talent was discovered in 1953 when his poem, The Call of the River Nun, won an award at the Nigerian Festival of Arts.

The paper also says Okara wrote plays and features for broadcasting and that many of his unpublished manuscripts were destroyed during the Nigerian civil war between 1967 and 1970.

 

 Gabriel Imomotimi Okara (24 April 1921 – 25 March 2019)^[1] was a Nigerian poet^[2] and novelist who was born in Bumoundi in Yenagoa, Bayelsa State, Nigeria. The first Modernist poet of Anglophone Africa, he is best known for his early experimental novel, The Voice (1964), and his award-winning poetry, published in The Fisherman's Invocation (1978) and The Dreamer, His Vision (2005). In both his poems and his prose, Okara drew on African thought, religion, folklore and imagery,^[3] and he has been called "the Nigerian Negritudist".^[4] According to Brenda Marie Osbey, editor of his Collected Poems, "It is with publication of Gabriel Okara's first poem that Nigerian literature in English and modern African poetry in this language can be said truly to have begun.

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