Wole Soyinka

2008/2009 Literature Mentor

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Published in 2008

Nigerian writer Wole Soyinka, 73, is acclaimed internationally as a playwright, poet, novelist, essayist and humanitarian. Considered his country’s foremost dramatist, he was the first African to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, in 1986, for his groundbreaking works that fuse literature and politics, Western and African traditions.

Soyinka’s passion for the written word stems from his childhood in Abeokuta, Western Nigeria, where he was inspired by his “long family of word-spinners” from whom he also “imbibed” his sense of justice. Educated at nearby University College, Ibadan, and at the University of Leeds in the UK, in 1960 Soyinka returned to Nigeria after six years in England to pursue his career as an author, professor and human rights activist.

An outspoken critic of Nigeria’s past tyrannies, Soyinka has spent long periods of his life in exile. His Poems from Prison (1969) and The Man Died: Prison Notes (1972) describe his 27 months in a Nigerian prison, and his most recent play, King Baabu (2001), satirises African dictatorships. “If the spirit of African democracy has a voice and a face, they belong to Wole Soyinka,” said the New York Times.

Soyinka’s latest work, You Must Set Forth at Dawn (2006), depicts his adult life and opposition to Nigeria’s corrupt regimes. The memoir follows on from his autobiography, Aké: The Years of Childhood (1981), and a long string of masterpieces written over a half-century.

Soyinka is currently professor emeritus at Obafemi Awolowo University in Nigeria, director of literary arts at the University of Nevada, a fellow of Harvard’s W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research, and a UNESCO Goodwill Ambassador. While encouraging young writers to look within their own cultures for idioms of expression, he says: “The ultimate lesson is just sit down and write.”