My mentor and friend Harry Olúdáre Garuba, who has died of leukaemia aged 61, was a poet and professor of English and African studies at the University of Cape Town, South Africa. A self-effacing but penetrating literary scholar and critical thinker, he advanced theories of reading (“animist materialism”) and translation-cum-textual circulation (“lateral textuality”).
His debut collection, Shadow and Dream and Other Poems (1982), published when he was only 24, revealed a poet of striking originality, sensitivity and tenderness. In 1987, it was first runner-up to La Tradition du Songe(1985), by the Congolese poet Jean-Baptiste Tati Loutard, in the inaugural All-Africa Okigbo prize for poetry endowed by Wole Soyinka (after receiving the 1986 Nobel prize for literature) in honour of his contemporary, the poet Christopher Okigbo who was killed in the Nigeria-Biafra civil war in 1967.
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