Insight; Gabriel Awuah Mainoo, the first Ghanaian poet to represent Ghana at the IWW

Founded in 2004, the International Writers’ Workshop (IWW) at HKBU is a self-funded, non-profit programme supported solely by donations. Its goal is to invite writers and scholars from around the world to visit HKBU to engage in creativity-inspiring activities with local students, writers, and the general Hong Kong community, providing opportunities for cultural exchange within and outside the university campus.

Each spring, a group of international writers are selected from a competitive pool of applicants and invited to stay on Hong Kong Baptist University campus for four weeks. Gabriel Awuah Mainoo is one of the few ‘‘workaholic’’ and ‘‘successful’’ writers on the Ghanaian literary landscape and beyond. In the past 3 years, he has been dominant and tirelessly swept many literary laurels.

• Gabriel won the forty under 40 awards for authorship and creative writing category in 2020
• The 2021 LFP/ RML/ Library of Africa and the African Diaspora Chapbook Prize
• Clinched the 2021 Africa Haiku Prize
• A 2021 Stephen A. Dibiase Poetry Prize, USA
• Won the 2022 Singapore Poetry Prize
• He was a recipient of the 2022 West African Writers Residency
• Nominated for a 2022 Pushcart Prize
• Winner of the 6^thGhana Association of Writers Literary Awards (Poetry) in 2022
• Won the 2022 Samira Bawumia Literature Prize (poetry)
• He was one of the two winners of the 2023 Transatlantic Relatives Contest and was awarded a residency to represent Ghana in the Netherlands.
• His current laurels include the 2024 IWW writer-in-residence at Hong Kong Baptist University
• And a forthcoming writer-in-residence at Aarhus University, June 2024 in Denmark.

Ghana is Proud to have such a young remarkable achiever putting himself, Ghana and ultimately Africa on the globe. Congratulations to Gabriel Awuah Mainoo and other three selected writers and scholars around the globe.

• Ana Merino (Fiction writer & poet, Spain)
• Azam Abidov (Poet, Uzbekistan)
• Gabriel Awuah Mainoo (Poet, Ghana)
• Ronnie Scott (Fiction writer, Australia)

Ana Merino
(Madrid, 1971) is an award-winning writer and the Director of the Cátedra Planeta of Literature and Society at the International University of Valencia in Spain. She is also a Full Professor of Spanish Creative Writing and a Collegiate Scholar at the University of Iowa. Winner of the 2020 Nadal Award for her novel El mapa de los afectos, Merino also published the novel Amigo. In 2011 she created the Spanish MFA program at the University of Iowa and was its director until December 2018. Ana Merino has published ten books of poems, two of which, Preparativos para un viaje and Juegos de niños, won the Adonais Prize in 1994 and the Fray Luis de León Prize in 2003. She is also the author of two youth novels, El hombre de los dos corazones (2009) and Planeta Lasvi (2024), a children album, and four plays, including Amor muy frágil (2013), which was staged in several Swiss theaters in 2012 and 2013 and La Redención at Iowa City in 2017. Merino has won the Diario de Avisos prize for her short articles on comics for the literary magazine Leer. She had collaborated with opinion articles for El País and won an Accésit of the Carmen de Burgos Award for one of her journalistic pieces. Merino has also written extensive criticism on comics and graphic novels. She has two academic books El cómic hispánico (2003) and Diez ensayos para pensar el comic (2017), a monograph on Chris Ware (2006) and the catalogue Fantagraphics creadores del canon (2003). She has curated six exhibitions on comics. She has been invited as visiting Professor to Dartmouth College (Summer 2023), the University of Zurich (Spring 2019) and the University of San Gallen (Fall 2012).

Azam Abidov
is a poet, translator, short story writer, singer, cultural adviser, and activist, who was born in Namangan, Uzbekistan. He is the author of over 10 books of poetry and translation to his credit, including My Name is Uzbekistan, Tunes of Asia, Dream of Lightsome Dawns, and A Miracle Is on the Way. Abidov’s work has been translated into more than 20 languages and published abroad. He was a Creative Writing Fellow at the University of Iowa, U.S. (2004), and a writer-in-residence at LCB in Berlin (2017). Abidov attended many international poetry festivals, creative writing workshops, and cultural events. He also received awards and recognitions for his poetic and cultural activities from various organizations in the Americas, Europe, and Asia. Abidov is one of the founders of Maysara literary and cultural club at the Yudakov and Oybek House-Museums in Tashkent. In 2018, he launched the first-ever Writer/Artist Residency Program in Uzbekistan for foreign authors and artists.

Gabriel Awuah Mainoo
is a Ghanaian creative practitioner, a part-time tennis junkie, and an author of books of poetry: Travellers Gather Dust and Lust (Mwanaka Media and Publishing, Zimbabwe),We are Moulting Birds (Light Factory Publication, Canada), Lyrical Textiles (Illuminated Press, US), and others. He won the 2021 Africa Haiku Prize, 2022 Singapore Poetry Prize, 2022 Ghana Association of Writers Literary Awards (Poetry), 2022 Samira Bawumia Literature Prize (poetry), 2021 LFP/ RML/ Library of Africa and the African Diaspora Chapbook Prize, and others. He was a recipient of the 2022 West African Writers Residency, the 2023 Transatlantic relatives Residency, and others. Mainoo edits poetry for Goat Shed Press, UK and Journal of African Youth Literature. His craft can be found in The London Reader, FIYAH, Michigan Quarterly Review, Prairie Fire, The Ex-Puritan, Other side of hope, Wales Haiku Journal, The Woodward Review, EVENT, Africa Haiku Journal, Best New African Poets Anthologies (2018, 2019, 2020), Old Love Skin among others. Mainoo is represented by Chandler Crawford, USA.

Ronnie Scott
is the author of Salad Days, a Penguin Special; The Adversary, a novel which was shortlisted for a Queensland Literary Award and the Australian Literature Society Gold Medal; and Shirley, a novel that was published in February 2023. He is a chief investigator on Folio, an Australian Research Council project collecting oral histories of lives in Australian comics and graphic storytelling, and he is a Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at RMIT University. He is working on a memoir and another novel.