By Okechukwu Eze, Abuja
On the afternoon of September 15, 2026, James Ngwu Eze’s phone rang. On the other end was a friend, his voice shaking with excitement: “Have you seen the shortlist?”
For Eze, the Enugu-based poet, journalist, author and singer, that call ended years of solitary writing, of questioning, of waiting to be seen…at one of the biggest stages of a continental showdown.
His third poetry collection, Unbind Me Now, published by Masobe Books, had just been named one of the final three for the 2026 Nigeria Prize for Literature – the $100,000 award sponsored by Nigeria LNG Limited and regarded as Africa’s richest and most prestigious literary prize.
From 223 entries received this year, to an 11-book long list populated by professors with three decades of teaching behind them, Eze – who is not a university teacher – had made the last cut.
He will now battle Ogaga Ifowodo’s Why Does God Need a Gun? and Tares Oburumu’s Flora’s Love Colony for the ultimate crown. The winner will be announced today.
When The Eagle Times caught up with him, Eze was still oscillating between relief, disbelief and triumph.
“It Feels Like Winning Already”
“There is hardly any other company in Nigeria that has done what NLNG has done for Nigerian writers for more than 20 years. The prize has existed without any stain and has earned enormous prestige. So, for your work to be recognised by the prize gives you every right to brag,” Eze began.
“For me, it meant recognition, approval, validation and, to a very large extent, popularity.”
He paused, then delivered the line that would become the heartbeat of this interview:
“Nobody can look at me now and ask, ‘What have you even done with your life?’ When I stand anywhere and say, ‘I am James Eze, I am a poet,’ nobody can dispute that claim.”
“Out of 223 books, mine was named among the three best poetry books in Nigeria in 2026. I feel immense validation. I feel noticed. I feel seen. In the solitary business of writing, being seen is fulfilment. For a moment, it felt like I had already won.”
The People’s Poet
The validation, in a strange way, had been foretold.
Eze completed the manuscript for Unbind Me Now in December 2025. He had not shown it to the public. Yet, on February 11, 2026, the English Department of Chukwuemeka Odumegwu Ojukwu University, Igbariam, invited him for a reading of his debut collection, Dispossessed, and honoured him with the title “The People’s Poet”.
How did they know what was coming?
“The book’s conceptual tapestry casts me as a voice of the people,” Eze explains. “This line in the title poem is not innocent: our hopes blaze in a soaring bonfire / the poet sits on the tongue of the inferno / a human shield against obstinate fate. It casts the poet as conscience, burden-bearer and truth-speaker.”
That role, he says, was foreshadowed in Dispossessed: for i am the missing lobe of poetry’s kolanut / the fearless chest that absorbs the anger of razor blades / I surrender my anvil at the crossroads / and unscrew the cork on my silence.
From Dispossessed to Unbound
Literary watchers will remember Dispossessed. Longlisted for the same Nigeria Prize in 2022, it went on to win the Association of Nigerian Authors (ANA) Poetry Prize in 2020. It announced Eze as a poet of anger and witness.
Unbind Me Now is different
“If Dispossessed was the cry of a young man finding his voice, Unbind Me Now is the voice of a more battered speaker,” he says. “It is a poetry of outrage against our socio-political dysfunction – corruption, poverty, the collapsed hopes – but I deliberately wove layers of hope into most of the poems. It does not end in despair. It moves from dysfunction toward redemption.”
The Advisory Board seemed to agree. In its citation, it praised the collection for its “fluid and aesthetically captivating language” and its arc from brokenness to hope.
Against the Professors
The 2026 longlist was a battlefield of heavyweights – professors who have taught literature for over 30 years, former winners, established names. Eze, a communications practitioner, stood as an outsider.
“I am not a university teacher. There were professors of literature on the long list. For me to emerge from that long list to this stage, the only explanation I can give is that God has my back,” he says with a laugh.
“I don’t go into any contest with the slightest thought of not winning. God, who led me this far on this journey, will crown me with glory.”
Whether he wins the $100,000 or not today, James Eze has already won something far more enduring in the lonely trade of poetry: validation.
And as he puts it, “Being seen is fulfilment.”
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