The Arts-Muse Fair

The Caine Prize for African Writing is open for submissions for 2020. The deadline to enter is the 31 st January 2020. The prize is awarded to an African writer of a short story in English. To enter please send six original published copies of the work for consideration to the Caine Prize office including a publisher’s letter detailing your author's qualifying nationality, word count, as well as the title of the story, year of publication and title of publication. The Award                                                   There is a cash prize of £10, 000 for the winning author and a travel award for each of the shortlisted candidates (up to five in all); the shortlisted candidates will also receive a prize of £500. Full details on how to enter can be found at http://caineprize.com/how-to-enter - please send any queries to: info@caineprize.com Eligibility Unpublished work is not eligible for the Caine Prize Submissions should be made by publishers only

Abdulbaki Abubakar Ahmad is the winner of the maiden  National Engineering, Science & Tech. (NESTEC) Essay Competition with a prize money of N300,000.  Abdulbaki is an Engineering student of the Kano University of Science and Technology, Wudil. He takes Poetry seriously a much as he handles Engineering. Recently, he was in Lagos to receive his NESTEC award and he braved the chaotic Lagos traffic from Ikeja to Victoria Island to meet with his inspiring Mentor, Mr. Eriata Oribhabor, the President of Poets In Nigeria (PIN). In this conversation with Mr. Oribhabor, we read of his love for power and poetry! Sounds mutually exclusive? Well, not with Abdulbaki, the chap who loves science and arts in equal measure. Read on. Congratulations on your win. Is this the first edition of the competition? If not which institution won it before yours? Thank you. This is actually the maiden edition of the prize and I am happy that my university left a legacy as the first, ever winning i

You see, that Friday morning, I was on a road trip to Lagos alongside eleven professional colleagues, in an Eighteen-seater bus branded "Department of Sports and Human Kinetics, Kwara State University, Malete", on the Ilorin-Ogbomoso Federal Highway. I like to take back seats when I am almost sure I would sleep during the trip. For some funny reasons I am confident aren't unconnected with the national shame that are our roads, I get worked up nights before road trips, especially if long, ruminating about how much headache I would have to deal with, wishing I did not have to go, and ultimately praying for some magic to get the to-fro trip over with, even before it begins, so that eventually, I would hardly get any sleep. Only I was on the last row of seats in this bus of discuss, snoozing off and coming back on at intervals. As we had miles to cover, our driver was quite out to beat time- expectedly so, because there's an annoying thing with group trips;

Review by Eugene Yakubu Behind this unpromising title are promising verses that will hold a reader spellbound with the wittiness, precision of imagination and prominent conceits. Garko’s poetry invites the reader to go beyond his imagination and expand his worldview with carefully molded verses and turgid images. What makes his poetry amusing is that it possesses a fair amount of literary and linguistic acuity that exudes enormous meaning in little lines— a feature of some of the most sophisticated poets only. It leaves the reader begging for more, cut too quick from this imaginative ecstasy that delivers in its first and short verses then allows the deafening sound of the mental images created to echo in the reader’s head. This is a collection to be read even though the themes end at surreal surfaces, only striking at the emotions, it offers a lot about love and nature, nostalgia and identity, virtues and vices and the illusory feeling of connection with the worl

Questions for the Man on the bridge and the heart is a whore the body, her palace of exploits where men dig into women's skins while shadows wander through the bush paths of their hearts like politicians keeping emergency aces ask the child who died faceless standing on the threshold where death was the best encounter whose mother only dwelled in the cozy shelter of denial that poverty could only kill but not open a grave of sores and frustration that a husband who constantly chooses to return home with sweat and grime and grease of a sun's leftovers smeared all over his ambitions does so with the legions in his body in full jolt without hesitation without any longing for that fresh scent of another locked in his chest is man not the demon or is it the world who navigates his pliant feet One man who belched truth said home is like bowing to God the world hands you no choice nature reeks of repetitions and conformity said the bridge is a palace

        Nigerian poetry has witnessed significant growth and metamorphosis over the years. Poetry without doubt has gained prominence as the preferred genre of literature especially among the younger generation. It is arguably also the most abused genre today. The advent of the new media and the subgenre of spoken word or performance poetry, have further revolutionarized the genre. Poetry has become more flexible and relatable, having lost its hitherto iconoclastic gaity; a consequence of the newer generation’s obsession with pop culture and entertainment.   Poetry is gradually losing its traditional essence as a sagely enterprise and rapidly degenerating into a merchandise. There is however the existence of a group of experimentalists or poetry fundamentalists who, working separately, are making sure that the value of poetry as we have known it to be is sustained. These are neoclassical poets bounded together by their genuine aspirations to keep the honour of poetry intact. Th