Born in Akure, Ondo State in 1958, Mr Garuba was a literary prodigy.<\/p>\n
He was still a teenager when his one-act play Pantomime for Saint Apartheid\u2019s Day was published in the Festac Anthology of Nigerian New Writing, a publication compiled on the occasion of the Second World Black and African Festival of Arts and Culture, held in Lagos in 1977.<\/p>\n
He was seventeen when he began his undergraduate studies in English at the University of Ibadan where he would later bag both his Master\u2019s and Doctoral degrees.<\/p>\n
While he was a student at the university, he founded \u2018The Poetry Club\u2019 which met every Thursday. It was at the club that poets like Afam Akeh, Remi Raji, Onookome Okome, Chiedu Ezeanah, Bose Shabah, Sanya Osha, Niyi Okunoye first planted their seeds of literary creativity.<\/p>\n
He published his first academic book, Mask and Meaning in Black Drama: Africa and the Diaspora, in 1988. He taught at the university for fifteen years before migrating to South Africa to teach in the English Department at the University of Zululand.<\/p>\n
In 1988, he edited the collection Voices from the Fringe: An ANA Anthology of New Nigerian Poetry.<\/p>\n
In 2001, he moved to the University of Cape Town, where he taught in the African Studies and English departments until 2019, and published widely in the fields of African and postcolonial literature.Meanwhile, in 2017, he published a second collection of his own poetry, Animist Chants and Memorials.<\/p>\n
In addition to being an author and poet, Mr Garuba was a member of the editorial advisory board of the Heinemann African Writers Series and one of the editors of the journal Postcolonial Text.<\/p>\n
He also served as acting dean of the Faculty of Humanities from February to December 2017, and held research fellowships at the University of Texas at Austin, Harvard University and Emory University.<\/p>\n
In late 2019, he wrote a blurb about the emphemerality of life and the permanence of art in Wreaths for a Wayfarer, an anthology of poems in honour of late Nigeria scholar, Pius Adesanmi.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":11,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"template":"","categories":[],"writer":[],"class_list":["post-25947","biography","type-biography","status-publish","hentry"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blerf.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/biography\/25947","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blerf.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/biography"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blerf.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/biography"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blerf.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/11"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blerf.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/biography\/25947\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blerf.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=25947"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blerf.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=25947"},{"taxonomy":"writer","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blerf.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/writer?post=25947"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}