J. P. CLARK DIES

One of Africa's greatest ever writers, John Pepper Clark (JP Clark) is dead. He was a contemporary of Wole Soyinka, Africa's first Nobel Laureate in Literature - they studied at the University of Ibadan together; and were both great dramatists and poets.

Clark was regarded as one of Africa's early  pre-eminent writers alongside the likes of Achebe, Soyinka, Ngugi, Es'kia Mphahlele, Denis Brutus, Kofi Awoonor, Ekwensi, Camara Laye, Flora Nwapa, Senghor, Amos Tutuola, Peter Abrahams. Clark wrote many important books mainly in the 60s and 70s.

His poetry was superb, collected in a number of books, anthologies and journals. Many focused on the traumatic ripples of the Nigerian civil war; hundreds of thousands of students studied his poetry in schools and colleges. 

Clark's dramatic works were also celebrated, including the early Song of a Goat, and Ozidi - the latter considered a profound autochthonous literary classic.

Chief Seye Bolaji, a versatile, prolific African writer, reminisces:   "I  remember a superb production of the play in Nigeria decades ago where my own senior brother, the late Barrister Omotayo Bolaji, starred as intriguing protagonist, Ozidi! How proud I was of my brother for years on end, marvelling at how he could commit to memory the countless esoteric polished verses and aphorisms of such an elevated play."

Clark's prose was also world class and polemical; his work, America their America, regarded as seminal and brilliant by the literary world. Clark was one of the elite writers who gleefully welcomed Soyinka back home after he won the Nobel Award for Literature.    

Clark was 85 when he died this week. Immediately after his demise was announced, Nigerian President, Mr Buhari, led the glowing tributes to the world class bard.

Gluck garners the Nobel Prize for Literature

This year's Nobel Prize for Literature has been awarded to the US poet, Louise Glück. 

She is the fourth woman to win the prize for literature since 2010, and only the 16th since the Nobel prizes were first awarded in 1901.

Glück was recognised for "her unmistakable poetic voice, that with austere beauty makes she individual existence universal" said the Swedish Academy, which oversees the award.

Glück, born 1943 in New York, lives in Massachusetts and is also professor of English at Yale University. 

Glück won the Pulitzer Prize in 1993 for her collection The Wild Iris and the National Book Award in 2014. Her other honours include the 2001 Bollingen Prize for Poetry, the Wallace Stevens Award, given in 2008, and a National Humanities Medal, awarded in 2015. 

 Her poetry focuses on the painful reality of being human, dealing with themes such as death, childhood, and family life. She also takes inspiration from Greek mythology and its characters, such as Persephone and Eurydice, who are often the victims of betrayal.

The Academy said her 2006 collection Averno was a "masterly collection, a visionary interpretation of the myth of Persephone's descent into Hell in the captivity of Hades, the god of death".

The chair of the Nobel prize committee, Anders Olsson, also praised the poet's "candid and uncompromising" voice, which is "full of humour and biting wit".

Her 12 collections of poetry are "characterised by a striving for clarity", he added, comparing her with Emily Dickinson with her "severity and unwillingness to accept simple tenets of faith".

The Nobel prize is given to the person who has "produced in the field of literature the most outstanding work in an ideal direction".

* Courtesy, BBC