Nduka Otiono, a Nigerian-Canadian academic and former journalist at TheGuardian, has emerged one of the winners of the 2023 Faculty of Arts and social sciences (FASS) Research Excellence Award (REA) at Carleton University, Canada.

Otiono, who is the Director of the university’s Institute of African Studies (IAS), was awarded for his exemplary research work.

Others recipients of the 2023 award are Jennifer Evans (History), Barbara Leckie (English), Derek Mueller (DGES) and Paul Nelles (History).

Commenting on the award via a statement obtained by FIJ, Pauline Rankin, Dean, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences (FASS), said, “The impressive number of high-quality applications, adjudicated by the FASS Executive and ODFASS, made decisions very challenging.”

It is the second time in five years Otiono has been awarded for his research work in the university. In 2017/18, he was sole recipient of the institution’s Early Career Research Award.

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His works in Carleton span creative writing, cultural studies, oral performance and literature in Africa, and postcolonial studies.

He has also published a co-edited volume of essays, Polyvocal Bob Dylan: Music, Performance, Literature (Palgrave Macmillan 2019) and DisPlace: The Poetry of Nduka Otiono (Wilfrid Laurier University Press 2021).

Four years after his first award, Otiono emerged Director of the university’s Institute of African Studies on July 1, 2022. His tenure is to run until 2025.

Since leaving Nigeria in 2006, Nduka has obtained a Ph.D. in English from the University of Alberta, winning prestigious awards such as F.S Chia Fellowship, Andrew Stewart Memorial Graduate Prize, and the Izaak Walton Killam Memorial Scholarship — and earning nomination for the Governor General’s Gold Medal for academic distinction.

In 2011, he held a one-year postdoctoral fellowship at Brown University, where he was also appointed Visiting Assistant Professor, but the Banting Fellowship took him back to Canada.

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A fellow of the William Joiner Centre for War and Social Consequences, University of Massachusetts, Boston, his interdisciplinary research focuses on ‘street stories’ or popular urban narratives in postcolonial Africa, and how they travel across multiple cultural formations including oral literature, the news media, film, popular music, and social media.

Also a writer, he is the author of The Night Hides with a Knife (short stories), which won the ANA/Spectrum Prize; Voices in the Rainbow (poems), shortlisted for the ANA/Cadbury Poetry Prize; and Love in a Time of Nightmares (poems), for which he was awarded the James Patrick Folinsbee Memorial Scholarship in Creative Writing. He has co-edited We-Men: An Anthology of Men Writing on Women (1998), and Camouflage: Best of Contemporary Writing from Nigeria (2006).

Otiono holds Bachelor of Arts (Hons) in English from the University of Ibadan, Nigeria, (1987) and an MA in English from the same university (1990). he also holds a Ph.D. in English from the University of Alberta, Canada (2011).

He was an accomplished journalist in his days in Nigeria, working for a number of high-flying newspapers, including TheGuardian.