Winner of the 2022 Nigeria Prize for Literature, Romeo Oriogun, has announced that he is sharing his $100,000 prize with the two runners-up in the competition.
Oriogun won the prize for his poetry collection, ‘Nomad’, beating Su’eddie Vershima Agema with his ‘Memory and the Call of Water’ and Saddiq Dzukogi with his ‘Your Crib, My Qibla’.
In his reaction, Oriogun thanked the judges and announced that he was going to share the prize money with the two finalists.
He tweeted: “I give thanks to the judges for finding ‘Nomad’ worthy of the 2022 Nigeria Prize for Literature. I give thanks and congratulation my brothers, Saddiq and Su’eddie, for their poetry and for the many journeys ahead of us. And as agreed upon, I will be sending 20,000$ out of the prize money to Saddiq and Su’eddie.”
The biennial prize, which is sponsored by the Nigeria Liquefied and Natural Gas (NLNG), has rotated among the genres of fiction, poetry, drama, and children’s literature since 2004.
This year was for poetry and it considered books published in the last four years.
