Theresa Lola’s work lives at the intersection of identity, language and performance. Upon migrating from Nigeria to the UK as a teenager, her name was ‘chewed up and spit out,’ a jarring initiation into the reality that belonging often demands erasure. Switching to her middle name, Theresa, was not a rejection of heritage but a survival tactic, a way to reclaim control over perception. In her 2024 poetry collection Ceremony for the Nameless, published by Penguin, names become both armour and mirror – signposts pointing toward one’s destiny, and instruments for shaping how one is seen by the world.
This tension between the inherited and constructed self animates Lola’s poetic world. Editors and institutions, she notes, often push artists into tightly defined niches – more Nigerian, more palatable, more ‘authentic’ – as if culture were a spice rack to be adjusted for market taste. She speaks candidly about how this distorts the sacred nature of self-discovery, turning it into a performance rather than a process. She notes that a poem is finished when it perfectly balances being ‘purely unsettled’ and ‘at peace’ – otherwise, it’s either unbearable or too safe.
As an Oxford creative writing graduate and a former Poet Laureate of London, Lola merges poetry with visual art, music and film to expand the emotional register of her work. She is not interested in easy answers or perfect narratives, but invites us to step into the parts that make us afraid. In the age of AI, she says, what is written becomes less important than who is writing it. It is in that space that the individual soul can shine through and be free to be whatever it is. It is there that all great poetry is born.
Photo by Jolade Olusanya
Theresa Lola is a British Nigerian multidisciplinary poet and artist, merging poetry with music and art and drawing from West African oral traditions. She is the author of two poetry collections. Her latest collection Ceremony for the Nameless (Penguin) was praised in the Guardian as a book that ‘assures her place as a trailblazer for a new wave of poets.’ She holds an Mst in Creative Writing from University of Oxford. A poem from her debut book ‘In Search of Equilibrium’ (Nine Arches Press) is in the UK’s GCSE syllabus. She has performed at Royal Albert Hall and The Jazz Café, been commissioned by brands such as Rimowa and Selfridges, and designed programmes for art institutes.
