Nigerian poet Romeo Oriogun won the 2024 Nebraska Book Award for his poetry book The Gathering of Bastards.

The Gathering of Bastards shows the vulnerability of being a migrant forced on journeys throughout the world. The terror of living in uncharted territory and the loss that comes with that are at the heart of these poems. See our full review here.

The Nebraska Book Awards is an annual competition that recognizes outstanding books written by “Nebraskan or Nebraska-related” authors, illustrator, publisher or a book exploring Nebraskan themes. The awards are open to professionally published books across several categories, including poetry, fiction, nonfiction, children’s literature, and design, with entries required to have been published in the previous year. Oriogun’s collection won in the poetry category.

Oriogun is a powerful voice in contemporary African and queer literature. He won the Brunel University African Poetry Prize in 2017, the 100,000 USD Nigeria Prize for Literature in 2022, as well as being a finalist for the 2020 Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry. In addition to The Gathering of Bastards he has published Sacrament of Bodies and a few chapbooks.

The award is presented by the Nebraska Center for the Book, an affiliate organization of the Library of Congress that “brings together the state’s readers, writers, booksellers, librarians, publishers, printers, educators, and scholars to build the community of the book.”

The Book Awards Celebration is going to be a part of the Nebraska Book Festival which is being held on Saturday, October 12th at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. This event will feature Nebraska authors, a SLAM poetry showcase, book vendors, and a presentation of the Nebraska Center for the Book’s Nebraska Book Awards, among other award ceremonies.

Congratulations to Oriogun on this achievement!