Nigerian Poet Ameen Animashaun Won the 2025 Evaristo Prize for African Poetry

The African Poetry Book Fund has announced that Nigerian poet Ameen Animashaun is the winner of the 2025 Evaristo Prize for African Poetry for his poem sequence Song.

Selected from a shortlist of five finalists, Animashaun received a prize of $1,500 in recognition of his work, which judges praised for its linguistic subtlety, structural control, and intellectual clarity.

Judged by a Pan-African panel of poets–Tjawangwa Dema of Botswana (Chair), Tsitsi Jaji of Zimbabwe, and Mahtem Shiferraw of Eritrea and Ethiopia–the winning entry stood out for its ambitious engagement with form and meaning. “It is quite haunting in its illusiveness, and it really trusts language to do all the work,” the judges remarked. “There is so much control over the line here, and expansiveness in thought. Most of all, there is clarity in each poem…This is a poet happy to throw themselves at language and encounter the not always linear, the abstract and so on without losing sight of the poet’s duty to clarity.”

The Evaristo Prize for African Poetry—formerly the Brunel International African Poetry Prize—is awarded annually to a selection of ten poems written by an African poet. Established in 2012 by acclaimed British-Nigerian writer Bernardine Evaristo, the prize was renamed in her honour in 2022 and is now administered by the African Poetry Book Fund (APBF). The prize continues Evaristo’s decade-long mission to champion emerging African voices in contemporary poetry.

Evaristo, President of the Royal Society of Literature and a prolific author of fiction, poetry, and criticism, remains deeply involved with the prize as an editorial board member of the APBF. She also serves as Professor of Creative Writing at Brunel University London.

Poetry
CALLING A SPADE II | Animashaun Ameen

CALLING A SPADE II | Animashaun Ameen | Agbowo Art | African Literary Art
I named myself Adam & you pronounced
yourself Steve; two of god’s greatest
anti-heroes. See, we do not even pass
to be called abominations – how the devil
is only the devil just because we want him
to be. In this story, we are the ones urging Iblis
to take a bite out of the apple, telling him:
eat from the fruit of life; break free from all the shackles
holding you down. I think the good lord never forgave
the first sinners for claiming their bodies as their own.
What good is a fall from grace when there is something
growing inside your stomach, waiting to consume you
from the inside out? The only difference between living
and surviving is the difference in execution. Somehow,
we are all gods in each of our stories: which is to say
we are the architects of our own misfortunes, which is to say
the first sinners didn’t actually fall from grace; instead,
they held hands like lovers would, draped their loins with lilies,
and walked [hand in hand] quietly out of grace.

Animashaun Ameen

Animashaun Ameen is a poet and essayist. His writings are mostly centered on memory, sexuality, and identity. His works have appeared/forthcoming in Salamander Mag, Native Skin, Third Estate Mag, Roadrunner Review, TheDrinking Gourd, and elsewhere. He lives and writes from Lagos, Nigeria. An oddball. A butterfly. He tweets @AmeenAnimashaun