Adeola Akinremi publishes debut poetry collection

The collection also takes unflinching aim at state power, the machinery of governance that crushes the individual, silences dissent, and perpetuates inequality across continents. Akinremi, who has reported on insurgencies, and the slow corruption of democratic institutions, brings a journalist's precision and a poet's fury to this theme. His verses on power speak not as polemic but as lament — the lament of a citizen who expected better.

A United States-based public policy expert and multiple award-winning reporter, Akinremi has been honoured with the Nigeria Media Merit Award for “Newspaper Reporter of the Year” (2014), the Nigeria Media Merit Award for “Features Writer of the Year” (2006), and the Diamond Award for Media Excellence. 

He has built a career that consistently merged courage with clarity, and his writings from the frontlines of Nigeria’s most turbulent stories have been referenced and cited by the Associated Press, The New York Times, The Guardian UK, The Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times.  

In 2016, Akinremi made global headlines when he exposed Nigeria’s then-President Muhammadu Buhari for plagiarising President Barack Obama’s 2008 victory speech — a scandal that triggered worldwide outrage and forced a presidential apology. His work in international development has taken him across Africa, Asia, Europe, and North America, consulting for the World Bank Group. 

He holds a Master’s degree in International Public Policy from Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies in Washington D.C., and a second Master’s from the University of Ibadan. 

Akinremi has spoken openly about the two poetic giants whose work shaped his sensibility as a writer. The first is T.S. Eliot — the great Anglo-American Modernist poet of the early twentieth century, whose fractured, layered masterworks The Waste Land (1922) and The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock (1915) defined a century's engagement with cultural collapse, spiritual dislocation, and civilisational exhaustion. 

Eliot's Modernism, its refusal of consolation and its insistence on the fragment as the truest form for a broken world resonates deeply with Scattered Ground's own engagement with climate catastrophe, displacement, and the failure of power. Like Eliot surveying post-World War, I Europe, Akinremi surveys a world whose ecological and political wounds demand a poetry of reckoning.

The second, and perhaps more profoundly formative, influence is J.P. Clark-Bekederemo — one of the founding fathers of modern Nigerian and African literature. Clark, himself a journalist and editor at the Lagos Daily Express before becoming a professor and poet, demonstrated to Akinremi that the African newsroom and the African literary imagination are not separate provinces. 

Clark's ability, in works like A Reed in the Tide and Casualties, to root political and social anguish in the specific landscapes and waterways of Nigeria — the Niger Delta, the rivers and creeks, the storms that break without mercy, finds its direct echo in Akinremi's own poetic geography of climate grief and displaced communities.

"J.P. Clark showed us that a journalist could also be the voice of a people's grief and aspiration," Akinremi has said. "And Eliot, that great Modernist, reminded me that poetry must not flinch from the ruins of the world it surveys. Scattered Ground is my attempt to hold both of those truths at once: the African specific and the universal human."

With the publication of Scattered Ground, Akinremi joins a select and remarkable global tradition of newspaper editors who have chosen poetry as a second language, a tradition that cuts across continents and centuries.

In Britain, the journalist and critic Clive James, long associated with The Observer and The Daily Telegraph, published several poetry collections, including the celebrated Sentenced to Life (2015), written while dying of leukaemia, which became a Sunday Times bestseller and was hailed as proof that a prose man of letters can, in the end, speak most purely in verse.

In America, Harriet Monroe, who founded the groundbreaking magazine Poetry in 1912 while working as arts critic for the Chicago Tribune, published multiple poetry collections, including You and I (1914), helping to usher in the Modernist era. Rita Dove, a former Poetry Editor of The New York Times Magazine and U.S. Poet Laureate, has published ten books of poetry, demonstrating that the editorial chair and the poet's desk need not be separated.

In France, Philippe Sollers, founder and editor of the literary journal Tel Quel and later L’Infini produced poetry-infused prose works including the radical Paradis (1981), a landmark in the French avant-garde tradition that blurs the line between journalism, criticism, and lyric form.

And in Nigeria itself, J.P. Clark-Bekederemo, who worked as features editor of the Lagos Daily Express — became the nation's pre-eminent poet and playwright, proving that the African press has always been incubating poets as well as reporters. Akinremi follows proudly in that lineage.