Death Does Not End At The Sea, the stunning new book of poetry by Nigerian poet, essayist and scholar, Gbenga Adesina, has continued to make its mark on the international literary scene.

The book, which won the Raz-Shumaker Prairie Schooner Prize in 2024, one of the most coveted prizes in the American literary scene, has been longlisted for the 2025 National Book Award for poetry, the first time a Nigerian has been so honoured.

The book immediately shot up to Number 1 in the African poetry category on Amazon, quickly crossing the thousand mark in sales within such a short period after its release.

Death Does Not End At The Sea has already garnered high praise from some of the leading scholars, literary experts and poets in the world.

According to Terrance Hayes, one of the most distinguished poets in the world, MacArthur Genius Fellow and Silver Professor of Poetry at New York University, Adesina’s book is “more than a great book, it’s a mature reworking of contemporary elegy. Adesina reconfigures the loss/ghost of his father into odes celebrating vulnerability and personality—as well as Fela Kuti in Versace and a globetrotting James Baldwin.”

Professor Aracelis Girmay, Knight Family Professor of Creative Writing at Stanford University, said of Adesina’s book,
“Gbenga Adesina carries us into startlingly capacious configurations of time and grief and kinship. Sublime, lucid, unforgettable. It is a gift to live to be touched by Adesina’s exquisite music.”

Matthew Shenoda, Professor and Chair of Literary Arts at Brown University, described the book as “…a requiem for kinship, familial bonds, tethered histories, and splintered branches that always remember their roots.
“Adesina,” he said, “bridges memory both personal and collective with the migratory movements of global Black life. What results is a poetry in witness and celebration, a tenderness and veneration, a welcome song in our dawn!”

Chris Abani, Professor of Poetry at Northwestern University, described Adesina’s book as a project of “A poet who has matured in voice and craft.” “Every line” in the book, he wrote, “quivers with a deft music. The layering of meaning, philosophy, hope, grief, rebirth, ethical questioning and song is unsurpassed. A major talent and an important voice, Gbenga Adesina has earned every victory in this book, every accolade it will earn and every moment of luminosity, of which there are many. In this breathtaking work we encounter a poet who carries this tradition with an easy grace. Beautiful.”

In Death Does Not End At The Sea, a book that is in the process of being translated into Italian, Adesina’s linguistic dexterity, his significant talent, enigmatic grasp of the inner architecture of language, his excellent scope, understanding of history and human emotions and ability to use language to carve an insightful reality are in magisterial and excellent display.

Adesina’s works have been published in the New York Times, Guernica, Paris Review, Narrative, Brooklyn Poets, Harvard Review, Yale Review, among others, and have been translated into six languages. He received an MFA in poetry from New York University, and has received support and fellowships from the Poet’s House, New York; Fine Arts Work Center, Provincetown; Olive B. O’Connor Fellowship, Colgate University; the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Harlem, New York; and the historic Woodberry Poetry Room at Harvard University, among others.

His work was included in the Best American Poetry 2025, and A POSSIBLE FUTURE: An Anthology of the Best Nigerian Writing (1789-2018), a publication of Farafina Books, which also included the works of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Wole Soyinka, Chinua Achebe, Ben Okri, among others.