Biography Essay

Gabriel Okara is the first significant English-language black African poet, the first African poet to write in a modern style, and the first Nigerian writer to publish in and join the editorial staff of the influential literary journal Black Orpheus (started in 1957). A Nigerian "Negritudist," he is a link between colonial poetry and the vigorous modernist writing that began to appear in Nigeria around the time of national independence in 1960. One of the founders of modern Nigerian and African literature, he has also published some short stories, a translation from Ijaw, and The Voice (1964), an experimental novel that was one of the more interesting works to be published during the unusually creative period of the 1960s, when Nigerian literature was coming into its own, providing creative leadership for other black African and Third World literatures. If Okara has not published widely, it is partly because many...