Longlisted Poem: “A Stratigraphy of a Name”
Ismail Bala is a poet, translator, and critic whose work bridges classical poetics and modern sensibility, and whose mentorship has shaped a generation of emerging African poets. Born and educated to university level in Kano, he did his post-graduate studies at Oxford. His poems have been translated into Latvian, Belarusian, Nepalese, Slovenian, French and Polish. He is a Fellow of the International Writing Programme of the University of Iowa. He is the author of Line of Sight (Praxis, 2020), A Span of Something (INKspired, 2024) and Ivory Night (KSR, 2024), Memory of Departure (Masobe, 2026), Night Keeper (Praxis, 2026), and Mad about her Shrimp (2026).