KSR’s Umar Abubakar Sidi’s dazzling sophomore collection, Like Butterflies Scattered About by Art Rascals has been selected as one of the five shortlisted books for the Association of Nigerian Authors/KMVL Poetry Prize 2023. The prize worth N500,000 is one of Nigeria’s most prestigious and consistent annual prizes for poetry and was won in 2022 by KSR’s Editor, S. Su’eddie Vershima Agema.
Umar Abubakar Sidi’s Like Butterflies Scattered About by Art Rascals is a collection of refined poetry that appeals to the senses, accompanied by abstract paintings drawn by the multi-talented creative, T. J. Benson, himself an award-winning writer too. In this collection, Sidi follows up on his successful debut, The Poet of Dust, by writing into a not-so-familiar style on the Nigerian scene, effectively making a name for himself in a unique corner. The work has been praised by readers and critics aloud as a worthwhile time occupier. The official description on the publishers’ website note that:
There is a luminescence of words in Umar’s sophomore collection of poetry, an audacity to employ poetic license without boundaries; a rascality, sometimes verging on creative mischief, to explore all perceptive and expressive possibilities. To probe, using the language as pathfinder, through dense uncharted regions of experience. To discover the mythical, pellucid elixir of eternal life hidden behind the screening stardust of mortal existence.
The other shortlisted entries for the 2023 ANA/KMVL Poetry Prize are: Utibe Hanson with Unnoticed: Presence of Things, Charles Terseer Akwen with On this Land, Tope Ogundare with Will You Buy My Wares, and Thomas Peretu with Whispers in a Junkyard.
The winner of the prize, alongside the other categories in the 2023 Association of Nigerian Authors Prizes, will be announced at the Association’s Award Dinner Night during their international convention holding at the Mamman Vatsa Writers’ Village, Mpape, Abuja in November 2023.
