Tade Ipadeola

Tade Ipadeola is an award-winning Nigerian poet who writes in English and Yoruba. He is a practising lawyer. In 2013 his poetry collection The Sahara Testaments won the prestigious Nigeria Prize for Literature instituted by the Nigeria Liquified Natural Gas. After reading the works of J. P. Clarke and Christopher Okigbo, Ipadeola started writing poetry himself in 1990, and he says it took him 10–12 years of consistent practice to master the craft. His first collection was published in 1996. His second collection was A Time of Signs (2000). He self-published his third collection of poems, A Rain Fardel, in 2005. Ipadeola has also translated two classical Yoruba novels, by Daniel Fagunwa, into English: The Divine Cryptograph (Aditu); and The Pleasant Potentate of Ibudo (Ireke Onibudo), both in 2010, but they remain unpublished. In 2012 he translated W. H. Auden's first dramatic work Paid on Both Sides into Yoruba as Lamilami.
Ipadeola feels great poetry cannot be produced without discipline, consistency and patience and bemoans the lack of patience in the new generation of Nigerian poets. He says: "Remember that poetry is like a baby. If you force it to come to this world before term, you have [a] premature [birth] and you have problems; you have to get an incubator, you have to get a specialist, you have to get special foods, so the best thing is to allow the child to come to term before you give birth to it. Some things in life cannot be forced and poetry is one of them