Efe Paul Azino built an entire festival because Lagos did not have one for what he does. In 2015, he co-founded the Lagos International Poetry Festival, West Africa’s first international poetry festival, and he has directed it every year since. It was a natural next step for someone already regarded as one of Nigeria’s leading performance poets, an artist whose work has helped bring spoken word poetry to wider audiences in Nigeria and beyond.
Azino was born on 18 December 1979 in Lagos and studied Economics at Lagos State University (LASU) before building a career centred on performance, literary programming and poetry. His poems, shaped around social, political and economic themes, are known for holding a room for the full length of a performance. Early in his career, he served on the editorial board of “The Effective Manager Monthly” and was the pioneer editor of “Mageuzi Magazine” and “Next Generation”, a newspaper focused on raising youth awareness of social and political issues – work that sharpened both his voice and his instincts as a writer.
Alongside the festival he founded, Azino serves as Director of Poetry at the annual Lagos Book and Art Festival, Director of Spoken Word Poetry at the Open Door Series’ International Cultural Exchange, a coordinator of the Lagos Black Heritage Festival, and Programme Director of the New York Black and African Literature Festival. He also produced “Finding Home”, Nigeria’s first spoken word poetry theatre production, exploring identity, displacement and African migration. His debut collection, “For Broken Men Who Cross Often”, was published by Farafina Books in 2015, and his work has since been translated into Afrikaans, French, German and Mandarin.
He has taken the stage at some of the world’s most established poetry gatherings, including the Berlin Poetry Festival, the Johannesburg Arts Alive Festival, the Spier International Poetry Festival in Cape Town, the Taipei Poetry Festival, and the Aké Arts and Book Festival. He has also held fellowships including the Osiwa Poetry Residency and served as the 2019 Moniack Mhor Poet in Residence in Scotland. In 2017, YNaija named him one of the most powerful people in Nigeria’s arts and culture space.
Azino’s philosophy on life is perhaps best captured in his own words: “I take each day as it comes. Plan your work as thoroughly as you can. Get on with it; don’t spend the whole time planning. Winning is somewhere in between.”
