Nigerian poet, Chiwenite Onyekwelu, is the winner of the first poetry competition to consider concepts of endings, with his poems ‘On Memory and Forgetting’ and ‘Time/Our Time’. ‘On Memory and Forgetting’ describes Onyekwelu’s father’s recollections of the Biafra war and ‘Time/ Our Time’ reflects on the impact of oil spills into the Niger Delta.
The two runners up of the competition are Zaynab Iliyasu Bobi and Rhiya Pau. Bobi’s poems, ‘The Final Words of a Stage-IV Cancer Patient to Cancer Cells’, ‘a new era’, and ‘a spade isn’t just a spade’ are three reflections on time in the context of death and Hauza proverbs.
Pau’s poems, ‘Enough’ and ‘Entropy’ consider the passage of time and familial experiences across generations. ‘Enough’ won the Platinum Poetry Prize in 2021 Creative Future Writers’ Award and was first published in their corresponding anthology ‘Essential’. ‘Entropy’ was first published in Pau’s debut collection ‘Routes’ (Arachne Press, 2022).
The competition was initiated to respond to and feed into a research project co-led by Professor Patricia Kingori at Oxford Population Health’s Ethox Centre. After the End seeks to understand who decides when something, such as a major global event like the COVID-19 pandemic, has ended. How do different ideas of the ‘the end’ reproduce pre-existing structural inequalities? What would a focus on after the end of events mean for the way we think about time?
The After the End poetry competition, which is co-led by Professor Kingori and Professor Laura Salisbury at the University of Exeter, invited creative responses from poets that critically engage with the idea of time and temporality and the question of who gets to say when something has ended. There were 270 entries from entrants in 13 countries.
Professor Salisbury said ‘The quality of entries was very high but there was unanimity amongst the judges. The winning entries were conceptually sophisticated and emotionally resonant and have really helped to inform our thinking about the project.’
The creative responses were invited during the information collection stage of the project, so that they could feed into the project itself.
Professor Kingori added ‘Our aim was to try something new – to think of poems as a form of data that will be used in our research. We are looking forward to ongoing communication with the poetry community.’
The competition was judged by poet Jenny Mitchell who also wrote her own response to the theme, ‘Island in the Sun’, literary agent Salma Begum, the University of Exeter’s director of Liberal Arts Dr Michael Flexer, Professor Kingori, and Professor Salisbury. All of the winning poems are published on the After the End website and are available for reproduction with credit.
About the winners
Chiwenite Onyekwelu is a Nigerian poet and pharmacist. His works have appeared in Hudson Review, Rattle, Cincinnati Review, Adroit, Terrain.org, Chestnut Review, ONLY POEMS, Ubwali Literary Magazine, and elsewhere. He was shortlisted for the 2024 Bridport Poetry Prize. He also won the 2023 Hudson Review's Frederick Morgan Poetry Prize and was a finalist for both the Writivism Poetry Prize as well as the Alpine Fellowship Prize for Poetry. Chiwenite has a Bachelor of Pharmacy (B. Pharm) from Nnamdi Azikiwe University, Nigeria.
Rhiya Pau’s debut collection, Routes (Arachne Press, 2022), commemorates fifty years since her family arrived in the UK, chronicling the migratory history of her ancestors and navigating the conflicts of identity that arise within the East African-Indian diaspora. Routes was awarded an Eric Gregory Award from the Society of Authors in 2022. Rhiya won the Creative Future Writers' Award in 2021 and her poem Salutation was highly commended in the 2023 Forward Prize. She is one half of ORIGINS Poetry Duo, who write and perform collective poetry that does away with “ownership” and “linearity” to decentralise and decolonise the traditional project of history.
Zaynab Iliyasu Bobi, Frontier I, is a Nigerian-Hausa multidisciplinary artist, poet, and Medical Laboratory Scientist from Bobi. She is the author of Cadaver of Red Roses O, Miami Books) won the 2024 Derricotte/Eady Chapbook Prize, winner of the inaugural Folorunsho Editor’s Poetry Prize 2023, Labari Poetry Prize 2023, the inaugural Akachi Chukwuemeka Prize for Literature 2023, and Gimba Suleiman Hassan Gimba ESQ Poetry Prize, 2022 and the first beneficiary of Carolyn Micklem Scholarship. Her works appeared or were forthcoming in Strange Horizons, FIYAH, Uncanny Magazine, Poetry Daily, Agbowo, Poetry Wales, Torch Literary Arts, Utopia Science Fiction Magazine, Poetry Magazine, and elsewhere. Her second chapbook, Uncensored Snapshots, is forthcoming with Chestnut Review (2025). She is active on X and Bluesky @ZainabBobi.
About After the End
The After the End project is an ambitious, multi-sited, long-term research project that involves a strong collaboration of interdisciplinary researchers from all over the world seeking to explore and understand different experiences of living through ends, living after the end, and equitable policies that take different ideas of ends and endings seriously. Through surveys, in-depth interviews, archival research and historical and literary examinations we seek to distinguish between ‘ending’ and ‘closure’ and counter dominant narratives of the end which make the pain, suffering and experiences of the least powerful invisible.
Drawing on an interdisciplinary approach involving historians, sociologists, epidemiologists, psychologists, bioethicists, literary and legal scholars, philosophers and policymakers, this timely and important research has two synergistic empirical and normative aims:
- To explore lived experiences of time and temporality of endings of crises, to capture counter-narratives and their implications for future practices, responses and policies, and
- To provide an account of the moral and ethical obligations and responsibilities of global health institutions in the aftermaths of crises to health.
From detailed comparative research in three countries, including ethnographic, cognitive time-perception and archival methodologies, we will foreground the people, places, processes and policies to capture everyday experiences of endings and aftermaths in context.