Ogaga Ifowodo wins the 2026 Nigeria Prize for Literature and receives $100,000 for his poetry collection, “Why Does God Need a Gun?”. The winning work is presented as exploring Nigeria’s religious and political violence through an imagined voice of a victim.
Both outlets describe the prize award and the collection’s central theme, though they differ slightly in emphasis. Premium Times foregrounds the way the poems examine violence through that imagined testimony, while The Punch focuses more directly on the announcement of the prize and the stated title of the collection and its category as poetry. Neither source reports additional details such as judges’ remarks or competing finalists.
