Enugu poet James Ngwu Eze has said that being named among the final three for the 2026 Nigeria Prize for Literature felt, for a moment, as if he had already won Africa’s richest literary award.
Eze’s third collection, Unbind Me Now (Masobe Books), shares the shortlist with Ogaga Ifowodo’s Why Does God Need a Gun? and Tares Oburumu’s Flora’s Love Colony. The three titles were chosen from 223 entries and an 11-book longlist. The $100,000 prize, sponsored by Nigeria LNG Limited, is expected to be announced on 9 October.
In an interview after the shortlist was published, Eze said a friend’s call brought ‘relief, disbelief’ and the sense that the book had ‘finally found its readers.’ He had completed the manuscript in December 2025. On 11 February 2026, before the public had seen the new poems, the English Department of Chukwuemeka Odumegwu Ojukwu University honoured him as ‘The People’s Poet’ after a reading of his debut, *Dispossessed*.
‘It means a great deal to me that, out of 223 books, mine was named among the three best poetry books in Nigeria in 2026,’ he said. ‘I feel immense validation. I feel noticed. I feel seen.’
The prize advisory board praised Unbind Me Now for ‘fluid and aesthetically captivating language’ and a movement from sociopolitical dysfunction toward redemption. Eze said that reading matched his design: he had ‘deliberately woven layers of hope into most of the poems.’
Dispossessed was longlisted for the same prize in 2022 and won the Association of Nigerian Authors Poetry Prize in 2020. Eze described the new collection as a more battered speaker taking ‘a bold and courageous rise to the tongue of the inferno.’
He rejected talk of losing. ‘I don’t go into any contest with the slightest thought of not winning,’ he said. ‘God, who led me this far on this journey, will crown me with glory.’
If the book does not take the prize, he still wants it remembered as ‘a watershed in Nigeria’s contemporary poetry’ and ‘the book whose impact rang the loudest in recent memory.’