Literary Birthday – 12 March – Niyi Osundare
Happy Birthday, Niyi Osundare, born 12 March 1947.
Niyi Osundare Quotes
- One hasn’t become a writer until one has distilled writing into a habit, and that habit has been forced into an obsession. Writing has to be an obsession. It has to be something as organic, physiological and psychological as speaking or sleeping or eating. (Niyi Osundare Website)
- You cannot keep quiet about the situation in the kind of countries we find ourselves in, in Africa. When you wake up and there is no running water, when you have a massive power outage for days and nights, no food on the table, no hospital for the sick, no peace of mind; when the image of the ruler you see everywhere is that of a dictator with a gun in his hand; and, on the international level, when you live in a world in which your continent is consigned to the margin, a world in which the colour of your skin is a constant disadvantage, everywhere you go – then there is no other way than to write about this, in an attempt to change the situation for the better. (Poetry International)
- Nigeria still remains my root, although my branches are also in different parts of the world now. As I have always observed, exile is a state of mind. (Tribune Online)
Niyi Osundare is an award-winning Nigerian poet, playwright, essayist, human/environmental rights activist, and Distinguished Emeritus Professor of English at the University of New Orleans. He is the author of over 20 books of poetry, two books of Selected Poems, four plays, two books of essays, and numerous scholarly monographs, articles, and reviews on literature, language, and culture. Some of his works include Songs of the Marketplace (1983), Village Voices (1984), Waiting Laughters (1990), Days (2007), and City Without People: the Katrina Poems (2011). His poetry is influenced by the oral tradition of his Yoruba culture. He was the joint winner of the Commonwealth Poetry Prize for for The Eye of the Earth in 1986.
Source for image: Nistong, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Osundare_niyi_12.jpg
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