Soyinka guns for Oxford poetry professor post

Prof wole soyinka

Nobel Laureate, Prof Wole Soyinka

Prof Wole Soyinka
Prof Wole Soyinka

Professor Wole Soyinka, Nigeria’s Nobel laureate leads a three-horse race for the position of Oxford professor of poetry, a 300-year-old elected post which is seen as the top academic poetry role in the United Kingdom.

The Guardian of London said Soyinka, with more than 90 nominations, has a strong support to win the seat, held in the past by writers from Matthew Arnold to Seamus Heaney.

He will be competing for the post with Ian Gregson, a poet, literary critic and professor of creative writing at Bangor University who was backed by 54 graduates.

Seán Haldane, a poet, award-winning novelist and psychotherapist who ran for the post in 2010, is the final candidate, with 51 backers, just one more nomination above the minimum of 50.

The winner will be announced on 19 June. The professor’s duties include giving one public lecture a term, as well as encouraging “the art of poetry in the university”, and are rewarded with a stipend of £12,000 a year.

First held by Joseph Trapp in 1708, the professorship, second only in prestige to that of poet laureate, has been filled in the past by Matthew Arnold, Cecil Day-Lewis, WH Auden, Seamus Heaney and Paul Muldoon.

Related News

The 2009 election saw the acclaimed poet Ruth Padel, the first woman to be elected, resign less than two weeks after securing the post.

Her departure came after the revelation that she had alerted journalists to allegations of sexual harassment which had been made against her rival for the position, Nobel laureate Derek Walcott.

The eminent poet Geoffrey Hill was elected the following year ahead of nine other candidates. Hill, winner of a host of poetry awards, will complete his five-year tenure this summer, with Oxford graduates due to vote on their choice of his successor next month.

Soyinka, who writes drama, novels and poetry, and who was imprisoned in solitary confinement in Nigeria during the 1967-1970 civil war, his poems smuggled out on toilet paper, received more than 90 nominations, including votes from writers Melvyn Bragg and Robert Macfarlane.

Soyinka, 81 years old this year, won the Nobel in 1986 for his “wide cultural perspective [which] with poetic overtones fashions the drama of existence”.

*Culled from The Guardian. For more, please go to; http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/may/07/wole-soyinka-candidates-oxford-professor-of-poetry

Load more