Dzukogi will receive the cash prize of $1,000 cash award, and a week-long residency in the home of Derek Walcott.
By Editor
Nigerian poet and professor, Saddiq Dzukogi’s Your Crib, My Qibla (University of Nebraska Press) has been declared the winner of the 2022 Derek Walcott Prize for Poetry.
The Derek Walcott Prize for Poetry is awarded to a full-length book of poems published in the previous year by a living poet who is not a citizen of the United States.
Dzukogi’s poetry book centres on the loss of a child, and the ways its grieving father tries to find solace. It investigates memory, healing, as well as death.
(Read also: Romeo Oriogun Announced As 2022 Winner Of The Nigeria Prize For Literature)
Dzukogi, on the victory, expressed his joy on his social media: “Your Crib, My Qibla was just announced as the winner of the 2022 Derek Walcott Poetry Award. Selected by the wonderful poet and human, Carolyn Forché. I am still shaking in tears. I miss you dear child, your name persists, your songs persist. Even though I am tending to the wound of your absence everyday, the light you left in my heart is still here, teaching me, protecting me from my own darkness. You continue to be a gift, dear child. Thank you so much Carolyn, for seeing this work, for seeing me. The citation brought tears of joy to Bahra’s mom, Sa’adatu.”
Saddiq Dzukogi is an assistant professor at Mississippi State University’s Department of English, and the author of Inside the Flower Room, selected by Kwame Dawes and Chris Abani for the APBF New-Generation African Poets Chapbook Series (forthcoming in 2018). He was on the 2017 Brunel International African Poetry Prize shortlist. His poems appear or are forthcoming in Kenyon Review, New Orleans Review, South Dakota Review, Crab Orchard Review, Prairie Schooner, Best American Experimental Writing anthology, and Verse Daily. His book, Your Crib, My Qibla, was shortlisted for the 2022 Nigeria Prize for Literature.
Dzukogi will, amongst other benefits, receive the cash prize of $1,000 cash award, and a week-long residency in the home of Derek Walcott.