Inua Ellams
The poet, playwright and graphic designer Inua Ellams is an award-winning multi-disciplinary artist. He has an ambassador role for the Ministry of Stories and is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. Inua arrived in London as an immigrant from Nigeria at the age of 12 and, apart from a few years in Ireland, he has been living in London ever since. Born to a Christian mother and Muslim father in North Nigeria in 1984, he has three sisters, one of whom is his twin. As of March 2021, Inua and his family have not yet been granted British Citizenship, despite living and working in the UK for over 24 years. African orature, which is the oral tradition of the continent, has been a key influence in Inua’s work. Other Nigerian writers, including Chinua Achebe and Ben Okri, who are both well-versed in Nigerian myth and folk tales, have also been significant influences. A powerful performer of his own work, Inua’s voice has been shaped and transmuted by his transnational journey and residence in the UK.
Poetry and Stage
Inua began his performing career in cafés across London and his first pamphlet of poems was published in 2005. Two years later he began to perform on stage, where his performances were heavily influenced by hip hop music and Romantic poetry. His work is a powerful mixture of musicality, heightened euphoric speech and Nigerian storytelling, and throughout there are recurring themes of displacement, identity and destiny. Inua has given performances at the Royal Opera House, the Southbank Centre and on TV and radio. Touring nationally, he has performed at Glastonbury, Latitude, The London Word, Richmond Literature Festival and the Aldeburgh Poetry Festival. He has also toured internationally in Malaysia, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nigeria, New Zealand and America.
Inua Ellams’ poetry has been widely published, notably in his pamphlets: Candy Coated Unicorns and Converse All Stars, published by Flipped Eye; The Wire-Headed Heathen published by Akashic Books; and #Afterhours published by Nine Arches Press. His poems have also appeared in the Poetry Review Summer 2016 and The Best British Poetry 2015 as well as magazines ranging from Poetry Paper, Magma, Pen International and Wasafri to Poetry, Oxford Poetry and Poetry Review. Inua was winner of the Live Canon International Poetry Competition in 2014, the Winchester Poetry Prize in 2018, the Magma Poetry Competition in 2019 and the Hay Festival Medal for Poetry 2020.
Plays
Inua has described his plays as ‘failed poems’ (inuaellams.com/#plays), whose subject matter he finds to be ‘better served by a multitude of voices and characters’; Roger Robinson, one of the three poets Ellams regards as his teachers (the others being Nii Parkes and Jacob Sam La Rose, with whom he enjoyed ‘hanging out’ in bookshops discussing Marvel comics such as the X-Men), mentored and guided him through his first solo show, The 14th Tale, which won a Fringe First at the Edinburgh festival in 2009 and went on to run at the National Theatre in 2010. This sparked a relationship with Fuel Theatre, who have co-produced all his subsequent plays.
The Half-God of Rainfall
This is Ellams’ story about the defeat of Zeus at the hands of the women he abused, from Hera to Helen of Troy, led by Modupe, a Nigerian market trader whose exceptional beauty and grace led to her being attacked and violated by the mighty god of thunder. Demi is the child of that rape and this half-god child goes on to become a basketball champion whose ambition drives him from Nigeria to the US and eventually to the 2012 London Olympics. Inua has acknowledged that the story’s origins go back to his time at boarding school in Nigeria as a child, before his family moved to the UK, where he would spend time reading Marvel comics under the covers at night in his dormitory and ‘dream of their epic battles’ (centerforfiction.org).
Inua is currently working on news plays and poetry and continues to be a powerful voice within the British literary and theatre landscape.
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