Wole Soyinka
Wole Soyinka, B.A. (Honors), whose full name is
Akinwande Oluwole Soyinka, is a Nigerian writer who is
Africa’s most distinguished playwright. He won the
Nobel
Prize in Literature in 1986, the first African to be so
honored.
Listen
to his Nobel lecture!
Watch
his interview with freelance journalist Simon Stanford after he won his
Nobel Prize!
Read
his Nobel Banquet Speech!
Watch
him
read his poem “Lost Poems” from
Samarkand & Other Markets I Have Known at Harvard University.
Watch or read his interview entitled
“Writing, Theater Arts, and Political Activism” at the
Institute of International Studies, UC Berkeley.
Listen to his BBC Reith lectures
The Changing Mask of Fear,
Power of Freedom,
Rhetoric that Binds and Blinds,
Quest for Dignity, and
I am Right; You are Dead.
Read
his
Stanford Presidential Lectures.
Read
his famous quotes.
Wole was born into a poor
Yoruba family in Abeokuta, Nigeria in 1934.
He received a primary school education in Abeokuta and secondary school
at Government College, Ibadan. He studied at the
University College, Ibadan, Nigeria (1952–1954) and the
University of Leeds, UK (1954–1957) from which he
received an honors degree in English Literature. He worked as a play
reader at the Royal Court Theatre in London before returning to Nigeria
to study African drama. He taught in the Nigerian Universities of
Lagos,
Ibadan,
and
Ife (becoming Professor of Comparative Literature there in 1975).
He received a honorary Doctor of Letters from the
University of Leeds, UK in
1973. He received a honorary Doctor of Letters from Yale in 1980,
a honorary
Doctorate from
Morehouse College in 1988,
a honorary
Doctor of Letters from the University of Toronto
in 1992,
a honorary Doctorate from
Harvard University in 1993, a
honorary Doctor of Letters from
Emory University in 1996, a honorary
Doctor of Humane Letters from UNLV in 2000,
a honorary
Doctorate of Letters from the University of Alberta in 2001,
a honorary Doctor
of Letters from Addis Ababa University in 2003,
and a honorary
Doctor of Humane Letters from Princeton in 2005.
His books include
Death and the King’s Horseman,
You Must Set Forth at Dawn : A Memoir,
Climate of Fear : The Quest for Dignity in a Dehumanized World (Reith
Lectures),
Ake : The Years of Childhood,
Selected Poems,
Wole Soyinka: Plays,
Collected Plays 2,
Conversations With Wole Soyinka,
The Interpreters,
African Theatre: Soyinka Blackout, Blowout & Beyond,
The Lion and the Jewel,
Myth, Literature and the African World,
and
The
Open Sore of a Continent : A Personal Narrative of the Nigerian
Crisis.
Wole has played an active role in Nigeria’s political history. In
1967, during the
Nigerian Civil War he was arrested by the Federal
Government and put in solitary confinement for his attempts at brokering
a peace between the warring parties. While in prison he wrote poetry
which was published in a collection titled
Poems from Prison. He was
released 22 months later after international attention was drawn to his
imprisonment. His experiences in prison are recounted in his book
The Man Died: Prison Notes.
Wole has been an outspoken critic of many Nigerian administrations, and
of
political tyrannies worldwide, including the
Mugabe regime in Zimbabwe. A
great deal of his writing has been concerned with “the oppressive boot
and the irrelevance of the colour of the foot that wears it”. This
activism has often exposed him to great personal risk most notably during
the government of the Nigerian dictator General
Sani Abacha (1993–1998).
During Abacha’s dictatorship, Wole left the country in voluntary exile
and has since been living abroad (mainly in the United States where he
was a professor at
Emory University in Atlanta). When civilian rule
returned in 1999, he accepted an emeritus post at Ife (now
Obafemi Awolowo University) on the condition that the university bar
all former
military officers from the position of chancellor. He is currently
the
Elias Ghanem Professor of Creative Writing at the English department
of the
University of Nevada, Las Vegas.
In 2005, he became one of the spearheads of an alternative National
Nigerian conference –
PRONACO.
Watch
or read
his first interview by
Democracy Now!
Watch or read
his second interview by
Democracy Now!