Out Of Africa: British-Nigerian Writer Theresa Lola Wins 2025 Derek Walcott Prize For Poetry
Theresa Lola and Mary O’Malley Share This Year’s Derek Walcott Prize for Poetry British-Nigerian writer Theresa Lola has been named the joint winner of the 2025 Derek Walcott Prize for Poetry for her collection Ceremony For The Nameless. She shares this year’s prize with Mary O’Malley, who earns the honours for her book The Shark […]
Black News 
Theresa Lola and Mary O’Malley Share This Year’s Derek Walcott Prize for Poetry
British-Nigerian writer Theresa Lola has been named the joint winner of the 2025 Derek Walcott Prize for Poetry for her collection Ceremony For The Nameless. She shares this year’s prize with Mary O’Malley, who earns the honours for her book The Shark Nursery.
The Derek Walcott Prize for Poetry is awarded annually to a full-length book of poems published in the previous calendar year by a living poet anywhere in the world who is not a U.S. citizen. The book must be in English or in English translation, and may have been published anywhere in the world. The prize includes a $2,000 cash award. In the case of translations, the prize money may be shared by the poet and the translator.
For this year, the $2,000 prize will be split evenly between the two winners.
Theresa Lola was appointed the Young People’s Laureate for London (2019–20). In 2018, she was awarded the Brunel International African Poetry Prize. She holds an M.St in Creative Writing from the University of Oxford. In 2022, her poem “Equilibrium” from her debut poetry collection In Search of Equilibrium, was added to OCR’s GCSE English Literature syllabus.
Far-reaching and musical, Lola’s book, Ceremony for the Nameless (published by Penguin Books), explores the act of naming and its role in shaping our identities, aspirations, and sense of belonging. She conjures and questions the realities of her dual Nigerian-British identity; traces the lineages of names; asks why some deserve to be named while others are treated as though invisible; and explores how our journey through life might require us to cast off old expectations, both others’ and our own—just as at other times it can bring us back, strangely and unexpectedly, to where we first began.
Find out more about the Derek Walcott Prize here.
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