Ezenwa - Ohaeto

Nigerian poet and scholar Ezenwa-Ohaeto studied at the University of Nigeria in Nsukka and the University of Benin. The author of several collections of poetry, including The Chants of a Minstrel (2003), If to say I be Soja (1998), The Voice of the Night Masquerade (1996), I Wan Bi President (1988), and Songs of a Traveller (1986), Ezenwa-Ohaeto was one of the first Nigerians to publish poems written in Pidgin English, bringing the cadence of a primarily oral language to the page. He is also the author of Chinua Achebe: A Biography (1997). 

Ezenwa-Ohaeto’s honors include a BBC Arts and Africa Poetry Award, the Nigerian Prize for Literature (joint winner, 2005), the Association of Nigerian Authors NDDC Poetry Prize (2004), and the 1997 Cadbury Poetry Award from the Association of Nigerian Authors. A critical overview of his work, Of Minstrelsy and Masks: The Legacy of Ezenwa-Ohaeto in Nigerian Writing (2007), was edited by Christine Matzke, Aderemi Raji-Oyelade, and Geoffrey V. Davis.

Ezenwa-Ohaeto died in Cambridge, England, in 2005, soon after arriving at the University of Cambridge as a visiting fellow in the African Studies Centre.