Mr. Tade Ipadeola is the Chair of the panel of three judges. He is a multiple award-winning author in prose and poetry who writes in Yoruba and English. He has published three major volumes of poetry – A Time of Signs (2000), The Rain Fardel (2005), and The Sahara Testaments (2013). The Sahara Testaments won the prestigious Nigeria Prize for Literature in 2013.
His poem Odidere (‘Songbird’) won the Delphic Laurel in poetry at the Delphic Games held in Jeju, South Korea, in 2009. He has translated an important Yoruba novelist, Daniel Fagunwa, from his native Yoruba into English. He has also translated poems by W.H Auden, Tomas Transtromer, and Lu Xun into Yoruba.
He was a distinguished writer at the prestigious Bellagio Residency managed by the Rockefeller Foundation in Italy (2015). He has been visiting Fellow and has taught writing at the International Writing Program, University of Iowa (2019). Mr. Ipadeola served as a judge in our inaugural poetry contest in 2023.