Kola Tubosun

Early life and education

Tubosun was born in Ibadan, Oyo State, Nigeria, to a family of six. He was educated in Nigeria, Kenya, and the United States.

He holds a Masters in Linguistics from Southern Illinois University Edwardsville (2012) and a BA from the University of Ibadan (2005). 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 at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville in 2009–10. In 2010, he 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.

Writing career

Tubosun has contributed to the Nigerian writing community since 2005, through poetry, travel writing, essay, prose, and literary criticism. His work has appeared in the International Literary Quarterly, Sentinel Poetry, Brittle Paper, and Ake Review.

Poetry

In September 2005, Tubosun released a chapbook of poems called Headfirst into the Meddle, to a limited audience. In 2015, he followed it with another one entitled Attempted Speech & Other Fatherhood Poems, published by Saraba Magazine. It which contains poems written about the experience of raising a child.

In October 2006, his poem "Here, Moving" won the Sentinel Poetry Bar Challenge.

Blogging & Travel writing

Since 2009, at the start of his Fulbright Program, Tubosun has blogged at KTravula.com to document numerous travel, teaching, writing, and student experiences in the United States, Nigeria, and other places. Places visited and written about include Hannibal, Abeokuta, Springfield, Des Moines, Washington, D.C., Lagos, Nairobi, Ibadan, New York, Joplin, Abuja, Kaduna, Nasarawa, Edwardsville, St. Louis, Glen Carbon, Eldoret, Minnesota, Wusasa, etc. Artistic personalities blogged include Maya Angelou, Ken Burns, Eugene B. Redmond, Tunde Kelani, Julian Henrique, Paula Varsavsky, Binyavanga Wainaina, among others.

In 2010, he contributed to 234Next as a travel writer.

Editing

From 2012 to 2015, Tubosun worked as the pioneering editor of a Literary Magazine of new writing from Nigerian and Africa called NTLitMag.

In November 2015, he co-edited as well as Aké Review, the literary publication of the Aké Arts and Book Festival, with Kolade Arogundade.

From 2015–2016, while he taught as a schoolteacher, he edited two issues of The Sail, an anthology of creative works of high school students.

Literary Criticism

His work of literary criticism has appeared in the NTLitMag, Aké Review, and Brittle Paper.

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).

Translations

Tubosun's 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.

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.

Journalism & Advocacy

Tubosun was the president of the Union of Campus Journalists at University of Ibadanwhere he helped set up institute two prizes for student journalists as well as internship opportunities for student journalists in prominent media houses.

In 2003, during a nine-month strike of the Academic Staff Union of Universities, Tubosun created a petition online admonishing the president and minister of education and warning them of the dangers of a continued elongation of the industrial strike to students and the educational system.

In September 2016, after the demolition of Ilojo Bar, a national monument on Lagos Island, he published a three-part investigative feature in the Nigerian Guardian about the causes, cost, and consequences of the demolition.

In October 2015, he was nominated for the CNN African Journalists Award for his travel piece Abeokuta's Living History, first published at KTravula.com.

Twitter in Yoruba Campaign

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.

The Yoruba Name Project

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.

Others

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

While at Google, he was also instrumental to changing the erstwhile inacurrate translation of Esu on Google Translate, an inacurracy that has caused a lot of backlash in the Yoruba language community for a while.

In March 2017, he began fundraising for research into creating a Text to Speech application for Yoruba.

Tech Innovator

He has been listed in 2015 and 2016 in the YNaija list of Nigeria's innovators in technology

In 2016, he was named in the Quartz African Innovator's List.

Premio Ostana

In January 2016, he was chosen 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 ceremony was held from 2 to 5 June 2016, in the town of Ostana (Cuneo, Italy). Tubosun was the first African to be so honoured by the organisation.

Selected works

Essays and Reviews