The African Poetry Book Fund (APBF) has announced the judges for the 2027 Evaristo Prize for African Poetry: Romeo Oriogun, Uhuru Phalafala, and Juliane Okot Bitek. Oriogun will chair the panel. The prize is open to African poets who have not yet published a full-length poetry collection, and the winner receives $1,500 and publication of their ten-poem manuscript on the APBF website. Submissions opened on October 1 and close on November 1, so poets have only a few days left to enter.

Oriogun is a familiar name to Brittle Paper readers. The Nigerian poet is the author of Sacrament of Bodies (2020) and The Gathering of Bastards (2023), both from the University of Nebraska Press, and he won this very prize in 2017, when it was still called the Brunel International African Poetry Prize. In 2022 he won the Nigeria Prize for Literature for his collection Nomad. He is joined by Uhuru Phalafala, a senior lecturer in English literature at the University of Stellenbosch in South Africa, who wrote Keorapetse Kgositsile and the Black Arts Movement: Poetics of Possibility and co-edited Keorapetse Kgositsile: Collected Poems, 1969–2018 (Nebraska, 2023). The third judge, Juliane Okot Bitek, is the author of three poetry collections and a novel, We, the Kindling (2025), a fictionalized account of women survivors of the Lord’s Resistance Army, and she teaches at Queen’s University in Canada.

The Evaristo Prize began in 2012 as the Brunel International African Poetry Prize, founded by British writer Bernardine Evaristo, who ran it for ten years before passing it on to the APBF in 2022, when it was renamed in her honour. Evaristo, the president of the UK’s Royal Society of Literature, remains an APBF Editorial Board member. The prize was created to encourage a new generation of poets who might one day become an international presence, and the APBF says its winners have gone on to publish chapbooks and full-length collections and to win further prizes.

To enter, poets must submit exactly ten poems, each no longer than forty lines, through the APBF’s Submittable page, with no identifying information in the document itself. “African writer” is defined as someone born in Africa, a national or resident of an African country, or someone with African parents. Poems must be in English, though translations are welcome, and if a translated work wins, part of the prize money goes to the translator. Poems may have been published before or won other awards. Self-published books, chapbooks, and pamphlets do not count against eligibility. The shortlist will be announced in April and the winner in May. Full guidelines are on the APBF Evaristo Prize page.