My guest on this episode is Tolu Oloruntoba. Tolu is the author of the poetry collections Manubrium, The Junta of Happenstance, which won the Griffin Poetry Prize and the Governor General’s Literary Award for Poetry, and Each One a Furnace, a finalist for the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize. His most recent collection is Unravel, published by McClelland & Stewart in 2025. That book was named one of the Best Canadian Poetry Books of the year by CBC Books, and has been longlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Award. The Tyee called the collection “a seeker’s book, exploring making and unmaking, doing and undoing, the twin existential horrors of ending and endlessness.”
Tolu and I talk about the tensions, both good and bad, that come from winning awards so early in a career, about the pressure he put upon himself while writing Unravel, and about going in a very different direction for his next book, a collection inspired in part by Keanu Reeves’s John Wick films.
This podcast is produced and hosted by Nathan Whitlock, in partnership with The Walrus.
Music: \"simple-hearted thing\" by Alex Lukashevsky. Used with permission.
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