“Writers Need Readers, Not Just Prizes”: Ifowodo Makes The Case For Literary Consolation Awards

THE announcement of Dr. Ogaga Ifowodo as the winner of The Nigeria Prize for Literature 2026 brought him the recognition he had pursued through years of literary labour. However, the poet, lawyer and activist used the moment not merely to celebrate his victory but also to reopen a longstanding debate about the welfare of writers who reach the final stages of major literary competitions without winning.

For Ifowodo, the $100,000 prize sponsored by Nigeria LNG Limited (NLNG) represents an important investment in Nigerian literature. Nevertheless, he believes the award could do more to recognise the efforts of writers whose works survive several rounds of rigorous assessment but ultimately miss the top prize.

Speaking after winning with his poetry collection, Why Does God Need a Gun?, he called on NLNG to introduce consolation prizes for longlisted and shortlisted writers. His proposal would spread some of the financial benefits beyond the eventual winner while preserving the prestige and value of the main award.

The suggestion has renewed a conversation that several Nigerian writers have pursued over the years. More importantly, it raises a fundamental question about literary recognition in a country where many writers struggle to find sustainable ways to finance their work and reach readers.

A Winner Who Remembers the Disappointment of Losing

Ifowodo’s appeal carries particular significance because he knows what it means to approach the summit of the competition without winning. In 2017, his collection A Good Mourning brought him close to the prize, but Oke Ikeogu won that year with The Heresiad.

Nine years later, fortune favoured Ifowodo when the organisers announced his name at the award ceremony in Lagos on Friday 9 October 2026. His victory completed a personal journey that had once ended in disappointment, although he had continued writing and developing his literary voice.

Reflecting on the experience, he described his excitement as natural for a writer who had invested considerable effort in his craft. He also recalled remaining relatively calm during the five-hour, Heritage-themed celebration until Professor Akachi Adimora-Ezeigbo, chair of the prize’s Advisory Board, prolonged the suspense before announcing the winner.

That theatrical pause briefly unsettled him. Even so, his thoughts had already turned towards the two writers who shared the final stage with him: James Ngwu Eze, whose work was Unbind Me Now, and Tares Oburumu, author of Flora’s Love Colony.

Before the ceremony, Ifowodo had joked with his fellow poets that whoever won would have to buy the others a bottle of beer to console them. Having emerged victorious, he decided to fulfil his own side of the bargain by buying drinks for Eze and Oburumu.

The gesture was humorous, but its underlying message was more serious. The disappointment of losing a major literary prize should not erase the achievement of reaching the final stage. In Ifowodo’s view, the organisers could acknowledge that achievement through a formal system of consolation awards rather than leaving defeated finalists to depend on personal gestures of goodwill.

A Proposed Financial Model for More Writers

Ifowodo wants NLNG to introduce the proposed arrangement from the next award cycle in 2027, when drama is expected to be the category under consideration.

His suggested model would reward every longlisted writer with $3,000 to $5,000, with $5,000 representing his preferred amount. Under the proposal he outlined, eight longlisted writers who do not advance to the final three would receive $5,000 each, accounting for $40,000.

At the shortlist stage, the winner would retain the existing $100,000 grand prize, while each of the other two finalists would receive $10,000. Those payments would add another $20,000 to the award budget.

Consequently, the total would reach approximately $160,000: the existing $100,000 for the winner, $20,000 for the two runners-up and $40,000 for the eight other longlisted writers covered by his calculation.

For Ifowodo, the additional expenditure would be manageable for a corporate sponsor of NLNG’s scale. He argued that the investment would offer meaningful support to writers whose work had already passed through the competition’s selection process.

However, the proposed structure would require clear rules on eligibility, the number of writers covered and the treatment of authors who progress from the longlist to the shortlist. The organisers would also need to clarify whether the suggested longlist payments would apply to every writer initially selected or only to those who do not reach the final three. Such details would determine the programme’s actual cost and how equitably it operates.

Even with those questions to resolve, the central principle remains straightforward: literary recognition need not end with a single winner.

A Debate That Predates the Latest Winner

Ifowodo’s intervention joins a broader discussion within Nigeria’s literary community about how major prizes could support more writers.

Professors Oke Ndibe and Nduka Otiono, alongside Maxim Uzoatu, Denja Abdullahi and other literary voices, have previously argued for consolation awards or a different distribution of prize money across literary genres.

One alternative would be to recognise poetry, prose, drama and children’s literature every year, rather than concentrating the main award on a single genre in each cycle. Advocates of this model have suggested dividing the existing $100,000 among the four categories, with proposals ranging from $20,000 to $25,000 per category.

Such a system would broaden annual recognition, although it would also change the structure of the prize and the amount available to each winner. By contrast, Ifowodo’s proposal seeks to preserve the existing grand prize while adding financial rewards for other writers.

The two approaches therefore share a common objective but offer different routes towards it. One expands the number of categories recognised each year; the other increases the number of writers who receive money within the existing competition structure.

Ultimately, the choice would involve questions of budget, artistic merit, institutional priorities and the long-term purpose of the award. Nevertheless, the renewed debate places the economic circumstances of writers at the centre of a conversation often dominated by the prestige attached to winning.

Why Writers Should Not Write Merely to Win Prizes

Despite his advocacy for consolation awards, Ifowodo rejects the idea that prizes should become the primary motivation for writing.

He insists that a genuine literary vocation must arise from an internal compulsion to create, not from the expectation of financial rewards or public recognition. In his view, writers who approach literature solely as a route to winning competitions misunderstand the nature of artistic commitment.

He invoked the familiar argument associated with Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka that an artist is either born to the vocation or is not. For Ifowodo, the writer must first enjoy the act of writing and remain committed to the work regardless of its prospects in a competition.

Yet he does not dismiss the importance of recognition. Instead, he distinguishes between the reason a writer creates and the rewards that may follow sustained creative labour.

A prize, he explained, can validate a work by bringing it to the attention of readers. It can also provide a material reward for the time, discipline and intellectual effort that producing a book demands. In that sense, financial recognition does not have to determine the writer’s purpose to remain valuable.

Winning the 2026 prize, he said, gave him a renewed sense of validation. Having emerged from a field of 233 entries, he regarded the achievement as both satisfying and energising. The shortlist had already encouraged him; winning the competition provided an additional incentive to continue writing.

His position offers a useful distinction in the debate over literary prizes. Writers should not depend on awards to justify their existence as artists, but institutions can still recognise the work and sacrifice involved in producing literature.

Why Does God Need a Gun?: Poetry, Faith & Human Courage

Beyond the controversy surrounding prize money, Ifowodo’s winning collection addresses questions of religious belief, violence, freedom and human dignity.

The title, Why Does God Need a Gun?, poses a challenging question in a society where religion often occupies an emotionally charged place in public life. Rather than treating the subject as an abstract theological argument, the collection explores it through the experience of Leah Sharibu, the Nigerian schoolgirl abducted by Boko Haram who became a symbol of courage amid religious persecution.

Ifowodo explained that he approached the character’s voice by asking whether the thoughts, feelings and imaginings attributed to her could plausibly belong to a child enduring captivity far from her family and familiar surroundings.

He described Sharibu as precocious and suggested that extreme circumstances can reveal strengths that a person may not previously have recognised. The forest, in his interpretation, may have intensified aspects of her character, particularly her capacity to resist, endure and maintain her convictions.

To explain this transformation, he drew a parallel with the biblical account of Christ confronting the trauma of death. The comparison underscored his interest in the tension between faith, suffering and the questions that arise when people experience extreme injustice.

For Ifowodo, the challenge was not simply to represent a victim of violence but to imagine a human being whose inner life could not be reduced to victimhood. He expressed admiration for Sharibu’s courage and treated her experience as a call to reflect on the demands placed upon conscience under coercive conditions.

That creative choice also helps explain the collection’s wider concern with religious authority. The title asks readers to examine the relationship between divine belief and human violence, particularly when people commit atrocities in the name of a supposedly loving and merciful God.

The Poet as Witness to Desolation & Hope

In his acceptance speech, titled “Soon, Our Better Angels Will Free Us – Or the Poet as Witness to Desolation and Dream,” Ifowodo explained the moral vision behind the collection.

He focused on the poem “Soon, Archangel Michael Will Free Us,” the final piece in the sequence “From the Forest of a Million Demons (Leah Sharibu Lifts the Veil),” which he identified as the collection’s structural spine.

Within the poem, the captive speaker dreams of freedom. Yet that hope also exposes the problem of theodicy: how an all-powerful, loving and merciful God can coexist with atrocities committed in the name of religion.

Ifowodo’s answer shifts attention towards humanity’s responsibility. He argued that people’s “better angels,” rather than reliance on divine intervention alone, must help secure freedom and justice. Human progress, in his formulation, depends on recognising the inherent equality, dignity and freedom of every person, regardless of gender, race, class, creed, colour or social identity.

He also described the poet as a witness who uses language to preserve the memory of extreme suffering and expose attempts by secular or religious authoritarianism to impose a single way of seeing, believing or living.

Consequently, the award carries significance beyond the recognition of a successful poetry collection. It directs attention towards questions about religious intolerance, the limits of authority and the responsibility of societies to protect freedom of thought and belief.

Ifowodo dedicated the award to Sharibu, saying her courage in refusing to renounce her faith under pressure from her captors had inspired him to write the collection. He also thanked NLNG for its support for Nigerian and world literature and urged the company to sustain its investment in literary and cultural development.

A Prize, a Calling & a Larger Responsibility

Ifowodo’s victory has therefore become an occasion for two related arguments. The first concerns the structure of literary awards and the possibility of extending financial recognition to writers who do not win. The second concerns the purpose of literature itself: its ability to confront injustice, preserve difficult memories and challenge assumptions about faith, power and human dignity.

His proposed consolation-prize model invites NLNG to consider whether the value of a major literary award can be measured not only by the prestige and size of its grand prize but also by the number of writers it supports.

At the same time, his reflections on writing warn against turning literary production into a contest for money or acclaim. A writer’s calling, in his view, must survive disappointment and continue beyond the announcement of winners.

That combination of institutional advocacy and artistic conviction gives his intervention its wider relevance. He is asking for a prize system that rewards more writers without allowing the prospect of reward to dictate why they write.

Whether NLNG adopts the proposal remains a decision for the organisers. Nevertheless, the debate has gained renewed momentum from a winner who remembers the disappointment of losing, celebrates the value of recognition and believes that the literary community can find better ways to honour creative labour.