Gabriel Okara

Gabriel Okara was a Nigerian poet and novelist who was born in Bumoundi in Yenagoa, Bayelsa State, Nigeria. He was the first modernist poet of Anglophone Africa, and he is best known for his early experimental novel, The Voice (1964), and his award-winning poetry, published in The Fisherman's Invocation (1978) and The Dreamer, His Vision (2005). In both his poems and his prose, Okara drew on African thought, religion, folklore and imagery, and he has been called "the Nigerian Negritudist". According to Brenda Marie Osbey, editor of his Collected Poems, "It is with publication of Gabriel Okara's first poem that Nigerian literature in English and modern African poetry in this language can be said truly to have begun." He attended the landmark African Writers Conference held in 1962 at Makerere University College in Kampala, Uganda, along with other prominent writers such as Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka, and Ngugi Wa Thiong'o. He worked as a bookbinder, a printer, a journalist, and a civil servant. He was also a commissioner for information, culture, tourism and strategy for Bayelsa State, and a special adviser to President Goodluck Jonathan on research, documentation and strategy. He died on March 25, 2019, at the age of 97, from natural causes. He was buried on April 6, 2019, at his country home in Yenagoa, Bayelsa State. He is survived by his wife and children.