CQAF 2025

CQAF and Seamus Heaney Centre at Queen’s welcomes Theresa Lola to Belfast to read from and talk about her latest collection.

In Yoruba culture, newborn babies are welcomed into the world, and ushered into the social fabric, through naming ceremonies filled with songs of praise. The names bestowed are communicative both of where the baby has come from – the circumstances of its birth, the atmosphere in the home – and of where its future will take it. Both are forms of destiny.

Far-reaching and musical, Theresa Lola’s second collection explores the act of naming and its role in shaping our identities, our aspirations, what we carry and how we belong. Lola conjures and questions the realities of her dual Nigerian-British identity; traces the lineages of names; asks why some deserve to be named while others are treated as though invisible; and explores the ways our journey through life might require us to cast off old expectations – both others’ and our own – just as at other times it can bring us back, strangely and unexpectedly, to where we first began.

In lyrical, joyful and moving poems, Lola breaks down the complexities of the diasporic experience and the way it is woven through family life, history and memory.

The poems in. Ceremony for the Nameless. are suffused with a beautifully intimate energy.that belies an insistent transformative power- always at work in seducing us into seeing the world through a different lens – personal and cultural, fascinating and enriching – Bernardine Evaristo

There is a bold immediacy and striking grace to Lola’s writing, rendering it accessible and memorable… this book assures her place asa trailblazer for a new wave of poets   The Guardian

What a joy to see a new sun rising in the poetic sky! We all will enjoy this collection,Ceremony for the Nameless, following the questions and answers with which Theresa Lola struggles. She offers here a wonderful book to add to your collection. – Nikki Giovanni

Whether writing about the British Occupation of Nigeria, Immigration, or her family, Theresa Lola is relentlessly inventive and often stunning.She owns the English language – Ishmael Reed

An immaculate and moving collection about the divisions and vulnerability of identity from a divine writer – Candice Carty-Williams

About Theresa Lola

Theresa Lola is a British Nigerian poet and writer and was appointed the Young People’s Laureate for London in the year 2019-20. In 2018 she was awarded the Brunel International African Poetry Prize. She holds an Mst in Creative Writing from University of Oxford. In 2022 the poem ‘Equilibrium’ from her debut poetry collection,In Search of Equilibrium, was added to OCR’s GCSE English Literature syllabus.