Nigerian poet who wrote in English. Okigbo died in the civil war in Nigeria, fighting for the independence of Biafra. His difficult but suggestive and prophetic poems show the influence of modernist European and American poetry, African tribal mythology, and Nigerian music and rhythms. "Prophetic, menacing, terrorist, violent, protesting - his poetry was all of these," S.O. Anozie wrote in Christopher Okigbo: Creative Rhetoric (1972).

Okigbo joined in July 1967 the Biafran army as a major, refuring more secure posts behind the lines. He was killed one month later one of the first battles of the civil war near Nsukka. He was posthumously decorated with the Biafran National Order of Merit. The poems Okigbo wished to preserve were published posthumously by Heinemann as Labyrinths in 1971, with Path of Thunder, added.