Adedayo Agarau
As a child, I was afraid of the dark.
Poet · Photographer · Lagos / London
- Member since2026
Open Studio
Selected work
- Poetry2026
- Poetry2026
- Poetry2026
- Poetry2025
- Poetry2024
Books
- Buy the book
2025 · Fordham University Press
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2021 · Akashic Books
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2021 · Vegetarian Alcoholic Press
Press
“Where Agarau stutters, you might imagine, he stutters on the same prowess with language. ”
“In Agarau’s honed attention to his city and its ghosts, a colorfully haunted place emerges, something of a sprawling museum-cemetery, Dantean in temperament. ”
“His poems are filled with dreams: “the hawk’s dream,” “the dream where i am gasping for air,” “the dream where my father kneels before the gods of doors.” ”
“Adedayo Agarau’s collection insists on confronting this failure. Rather than offering reportage or political slogans, the poems stage the issues as lived experiences and stand out for their emotional precision and resistance to narrative closure.”
Adedayo Agarau’s debut collection, The Years of Blood, won the 2026 Nossrat Yassini Poetry Prize. He won The Future Awards Africa Prize for Literature in 2025, and his poem “Halloween, Iowa” won the C. P. Cavafy Prize. Adedayo was a Wallace Stegner Fellow, a Cave Canem Fellow, and a 2024 Ruth Lilly-Rosenberg Fellowship finalist.