This week on My Poetic Side, we look at one of the 2025 winners of the Ruth Lilly & Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellows award, a document linked to Nazim Hikmet and the death of the poet Derry O’Sullivan.
Maryhilda Obasiota Ibe Announced as Fellowship Winner
Maryhilda Obasiota Ibe has been named as one the 2025 winners of the Ruth Lilly & Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellows. The fellowship has been awarded as a recognition of the contributions that she has made to poetry and has a prize find of $27,000 which is intended to her develop her poetry further.
There were a total of five poets who received fellowships this year. The others were Aris Kian, DeeSoul Carson, Andres Cordoba and Jada Renee Allen. Each of the new fellows will receive a Poetry magazine subscription and also an invitation to submit some of their work to the publication. Their attendance at the Miami Poetry Festival will also be sponsored and they will take part in an inaugural poetry reading.
Maryhilda Obasiota Ibe has a BA in English and Literary Studies which she received from the the University of Calabar, Nigeria and an MFA from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, U.S.A. She is a previous winner of numerous awards for her poetry including a 2025 Indiana Review Poetry Prize, and a 2024 American Literary Review Poetry Prize.
Backed by the Poetry Foundation, The Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowships is an annual prize awarded to five different poets between the ages of 21 and 31 with the goal of supporting them to develop their poetry. The fellowship was inaugurated in 1989 and then expanded in 2013.
Document Linked to Nazim Hikmet Unveiled
The intelligence agency in Turkey has released a document from its archive that contains a poem, drawing and a signature believed to be attributed to Nazim Hikmet, the prominent Turkish poet.
The document which is dated 1050 was published by the National Intelligence Organisation features verses from “Davet” one of Hikmet’s poems.
Hikmet was born in 1902 and developed an interest in writing poetry from a very early age. He studied political science and economics in Moscow before returning to Turkey as a Marxist in 1924, just year after the founding of the new Turkish Republic which was founded as a result of the collapse of the Ottoman Empire.
Hikmet was known as a “romantic communist” and is reported that his political beliefs lead to him being repeatedly arrested.
He died in 1963 aged 61, having spent much of his life in a state of exile.
2002 was declared the Year of Nazim Hikmet by UNESCO in order to mark the occasion of the 100th anniversary of the poet’s birthday.
Derry O’Sullivan, Irish Language Poet, Dies in Paris
The Irish language poet Derry O’Sullivan has passed away at the age of 81. He was originally from Cork but had been living in Paris for many years.
He published three collections of poetry, written in Irish, the last of which was published in 2005 and was a lengthy poem about the Paris takeover of 1940 by the Nazis. He also publish a collection of poems in French.
O’Sullivan was responsible for the publication of the first direct translation into French of An Chailleach Bhéarra, a 10th-Century Irish poem.
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