The Sokoto Book Arts Festival (SOBAFest) has officially confirmed its 2026 edition. The festival will take place in August 2026 in Sokoto Nigeria, organized by Book O’Clock Literary Foundation in partnership with Poetry Club UDUS.
SOBAFEST has always been a journey. For every year over the last 5 years, we have gathered to continuously explore our culture, diversity and the threads connects us as people through the history and creativity in Arewa.
SOBAFEST 2026: Awakening: The Oasis seeks to spark conversations around collective consciousness, healing, cultural memory, belonging, and the urgent need for intentional safe community-building in contemporary Northern Nigeria and beyond.
Following years of exploring narrative, heritage, movement, ascension, and intersectionality, this edition asks a deeper question: what do we do after awareness? Once we have recognized our histories, our fractures, our multiplicities, and our shared humanity, how do we begin to imagine spaces of restoration, solidarity, and future-making?
The festival aims to create conversations that move beyond critique into reflection, connection, and possibility. We are interested in interrogating how art, literature, music, film, oral traditions, and community spaces can become sites of healing and consciousness in a time marked by social fragmentation, cultural erasure, displacement, and digital alienation.
The idea of The Oasis serves both as metaphor and aspiration. In a region and generation constantly navigating instability, exhaustion, and transition, the festival imagines creative spaces as places of refuge, renewal, gathering, and resistance. The programming therefore attempts to tell a story of people coming together after long periods of disconnection to collectively imagine what survival, care, and cultural continuity can look like.
The festival will curate conversations, performances, exhibitions, screenings, workshops, storytelling sessions, and community-centered experiences that emphasize dialogue across generations, disciplines, and identities. Particular attention will be given to themes of language preservation, indigenous knowledge systems, memory, spirituality, youth identity, artistic responsibility, and the evolving role of Northern creatives in shaping social consciousness.
At its core, Awakening: The Oasis is an invitation: to pause, to gather, to listen deeply, and to collectively build spaces where creativity becomes not only expression, but sustenance.
ABOUT SOBAFEST: Launched in 2021, the Sokoto Book and Arts Festival is committed to reshaping narratives, celebrating cultural memory, and amplifying voices through multidisciplinary engagement. Since 2021, it has brought together over 2000 art enthusiasts in the state and engaged them in cultural and artistic conversations, activities and performances. It is a project of Book O’Clock, a Sokoto-based literary organisation, in collaboration with community partners like Poetry Club UDUS.
ABOUT THE CURATORS
MAJEED BN SALEEH: Abdulmajeed Saleh Muhammad, known as Majeed Bin Saleeh is a multi-lingual (English, Hausa and Arabic) spoken word poet from The Seat of The Caliphate. He is a multiple poetry slam winner including the Sokoto Book and Arts Festival (SOBAFest) Prize for Arts 2022, The Rhyming Echoes 2023 and the first runner up Mudi Sipikin (KAPFEST) Poetry Slam 2024.
An alumnus of the Building Bridges Project for Creatives (Cohort 2) by Simplypoetry Foundation, Majeed is a socially conscious artist engaging the issues of climate change, identity and mental health. His works also explores the beauty of culture with a touch of Majnun-styled love. He writes with a unique blend of languages to effectively reach a wide audience and most importantly, his immediate society.
He has performed on numerous prestigious stages across the country like the Hausa International Book and Arts Festival (HIBAF2025), Kano International Poetry Festival (KAPFest2025), Arts and Vibes 2024, ZABAFest2026, Poetry Unusual Kaduna, and he was the HEADLINER Performing Act for the 2nd Edition of Rhymes and Rambles (INFERNO) Kaduna. IG:@majeed-bn-saleeh FB: Majeed Bn Saleeh
USMAN ADAM: Usman Adam is a Nigerian Fulani multi-lingual budding Writer, a member of the Hilltop Creative Arts Foundation and an award winning poet. He majored in Law at Usmanu Danfodiyo University Sokoto.
Usman is a mobile photographer and video editor. His works explore the intersection of identity and culture. He won the 2024 poetry slam competition organized by the Sokoto Book and Art Festival (SOBAFEST). In 2025, he won the Youth Artivism Festival at Kwara State.
Usman also served as a co- judge for the Book O’clock Anniversary Essay Competition in 2025. His Photographs have appeared on MAAR Review, The Ugly Review and Voice of African Literature Magazine. He’s also a fellow and Resident of the Building Bridges Project For Creatives. He’s currently a resident of Ebedi International Writers Residency.
For media enquiries, interviews, sponsorship or partnership opportunities, please contact: Majeed Bn Saleeh
Curator, SOBAFest
09064009334
