Kola Tubosun

Kọ́lá Túbọ̀sún (born 22 September 1981) is a Nigerian linguist, writer, and teacher whose work and influence span the fields of education, technology, literature, journalism, and linguistics. He is a Fulbright Fellow (Southern Illinois University Edwardsville, 2009) and recipient of the Premio Ostana Special Prize for Mother Tongue Literature 2016. He writes in Yoruba and English. He was named twice as one of the country's top innovators and in 2016 as part of the Quartz Africa Innovator's List.

Tubosun was born in Ibadan, Oyo State, Nigeria, to a family of six. He was educated in Nigeria, Kenya, and the United States. While studying in the University of Ibadan, he was a member of the Union of Campus Journalists, University of Ibadan which he led as president between 2002-2004. He holds a Masters in Linguistics from Southern Illinois University Edwardsville (2012). He also studied briefly in Moi University, Eldoret, Kenya, in April 2005, as part of a MacArthur Foundation-sponsored Socio-Cultural Exchange Programme. He was granted a Fulbright scholarship in 2009 through which he taught Yoruba language at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville in 2009–10. He has also worked as a volunteer adult literacy tutor, with resettled immigrants, at the International Institute of St. Louis, Missouri, and later as a high school teacher of English language in Lagos, Nigeria.

Tubosun has contributed to the Nigerian writing community since 2005, through poetry, travel writing, essay, prose, and literary criticism. While he worked in Lagos, (2015–16) he edited two issues of The Sail, an anthology of creative works. He also edited an online-based literary magazine about new writing from Nigerian and Africa called NTLitMag (2012–15), as well as Aké Review (November 2015), the literary publication of the Aké Arts and Book Festival.

In 2016, he wrote the entry on Nnedi Okorafor's science fiction novel Lagoon for "Imaginary Wonderlands" (October, 2016), a collection of essays about invented worlds in literature from around the globe, from Dante to Rushdie. The book was edited by Laura Miller (writer).

In September 2015, he released a poetry chapbook entitled Attempted Speech & Other Fatherhood Poems, which contains poems written about the experience of raising a child.

His work in in journalism and the documentation of the Nigerian literary, cultural, and language experience have been published on his personal travel blog and other places. In 2015, he was nominated for the CNN/Multichoice African Journalists Awards.

Kọ́lá Túbọ̀sún at a recent book panel. Photo courtesy Ake Arts and Book Festival 2016

In 2012, Tubosun started an online campaign to demand that Twitter include Yoruba (his mother tongue) in the list of languages into which Twitter was being translated: 1 March 2012 was declared "the Tweet Yoruba Day" to call attention to the matter. The campaign involved other speakers of Yoruba online tweeting only in the language and directing their comments to the Twitter translation platform, and it eventually yielded first an acknowledgement of the protest and then a promise to act in support of the idea. The campaign continued on 1 March 2013 and again on 1 March 2014. In August 2014, Twitter announced through a tweet that they were now adding Yoruba (along with Esperanto) to the translation platform, ending the two years of advocacy.

Tubosun founded the "Yorùbá Name Documentation Project" at YorubaName.com in March 2015 after months of crowdfunding as an effort to document all names in Yoruba in an accessible multimedia format while bringing together a community of interested linguists and other culture enthusiasts to document the African cultural and linguistic experience on the web. He is also involved in setting up a version for Igbo language at IgboName.com. On 8 August 2015, the project released a free Yorùbá Keyboard software for Mac and Windows to allow its users type in Yorùbá language on the internet with an update to cater for Igbo in July 2016.

Between October 2015 and July 2016, Tubosun worked as a Linguist at Google (Nigeria) as Project Manager, leading a language team in Lagos.

Tubosun has worked as a freelance literary and non-literary translator since 2008. His work in localizing the predictive text input product "T9" was detailed in a memoir/ essay for Farafina Magazine in 2007 titled "Speaking the Machine".

In February 2014, he was part of the Cassava Republic Press Ankara Press Valentine Anthology, which had short stories about love by African writers translated into local languages.

He has also worked in translating a number of poems from English, by writers from all over the world, into Yoruba language.

In November 2016, at the Aké Arts and Book Festival, he was instrumental in translating a short story by Kenyan writer Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o into Yoruba language, part of which he read out at the festival.

The Premio Ostana, a glass-art sculpture and a medal, created by Silvio Vigliaturo, a famous contemporary Italian artist and glass sculptor.

In January 2016, he was named as a recipient of a Premio Ostana "Special Prize" for Mother Tongue Literature (Il Premio Ostana Internazionale Scritture in Lingua Madre 2016), a prize given to any individual who has done writing and notable advocacy for the defence of an indigenous language. The Prize is organized by the Culture of the Chambra D'Oc in the town of Ostana (Cuneo, Italy). The eighth edition of the Prize Ceremony was held from 2 to 5 June 2016 in Italy, in collaboration with the Municipality of Ostana. Tubosun was the first African to be so honoured.

Poetry chapbooks

• Headfirst into the Meddle (2005)
• Attempted Speech and Other Fatherhood Poems (2015).

Edited

• Edo North: Field Studies of the Languages and Lands of the Northern Edo (2011). Essays in Honour of Professor Ben O. Elugbe. Zenith Book House.
• The Sail: Issue 1 (March 2015), Whitesands School, Lekki
• The Sail: Issue 2 (May 2016), Whitesands School, Lekki

Translations

• "Arábìnrin Inú Asọ Ọlọsàn. Short Story by Sarah Ladipo Manyika" (February 2015), Ankara Press Anthology
• "Sátidé Létí Òkun – Saturday by the Sea" (2014). Three Poems by Fred D’Aguiar. Ake Review
• "Ọkùnrín tó n dágbé àti ìkookò – The Hermit and the Fox" (2010). Short story by Klemen Pisk
• "Volta. Poem by Richard Berengarten" (November 2009), International Literary Quarterly, Issue #9

Other works in print

• "For Subsideen the Gnome" (2014). Poem in The Moth, Issue 17: Summer, 2014

• "Two Poems" (2014) in Footmarks: Poems on One Hundred Years of Nigeria's Nationhood, edited by Ezeigbo & Okoli.
• "Behind the Door" (2010). Short story in fiction anthology African Roar
• "Two Poems" (January 2005), Sentinel Poetry Quarterly

• "Attempted Speech and Other Fatherhood Poems". Saraba Magazine. 30 September 2015. Retrieved 30 September 2015. 
• "Edo North: Field Studies of the Languages and Lands of the Northern Edo: Essays in Honour of Professor Ben O. Elugbe". SOAS.