Kobena Eyi Acquah

Kobena Eyi Acquah is a poet and lawyer whose first collection, The Man Who Died (1984), won the British Airways Commonwealth Poetry Prize in 1985. He was born in Winneba in 1952.

He studied at the University of Ghana and qualified at the Ghana School of Law, and has worked as a lawyer and investment counsellor alongside his writing. He met the poet Atukwei Okai in 1971 and, like him, treats poetry as something to be performed, drawing on musical folk traditions.

With his drama group The Living Echoes he staged his poems at the W. E. B. Du Bois Centre in Accra, including Birth and Rebirth in January 1988 and the premiere of Music for a Dream Dance that July, remembered as one of the landmark events of Ghanaian poetry. His other collections include Rivers Must Flow and No Time for a Masterpiece (1995). He was president of the Ghana Association of Writers in 1993 and has sat on the Ghana Book Development Council and the Copyright Board.