Wole Soyinka

Introduction

Wole Soyinka

The fact that Wole Soyinka has lived to write so much about the African experience is a miracle. Throughout his long and productive career, Soyinka’s politics have placed him in danger repeatedly. His upbringing reflected both African and Western influences, and the conflict and interaction between these two forces would occupy much of his writing, particularly in the play Death and the King's Horseman. Through drama, poetry, essays, and autobiographies, Soyinka has documented not only the struggles of his homeland of Nigeria but of the African continent as a whole. His works earned him the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1986, and he used the occasion to highlight the plight of fellow activist Nelson Mandela. Soyinka’s life has been so full of intrigue and accomplishment that he has published several memoirs in which the hardships of the African nation overlap with Soyinka’s own personal evolution.

Essential Facts

1. Soyinka was imprisoned for nearly two years during the Biafran Civil War in the late 1960s. A few years after his release, he published a book chronicling the experience titled The Man Died: Prison Notes.
2. During a period of political unrest in the mid 1990s, Soyinka lived in exile in the United States and taught at Emory University.
3. In addition to his prolific writing career, Soyinka has founded numerous theatrical groups, including Nineteen-Sixty Masks and Guerilla Unit.
4. One of Soyinka’s most famous theatrical works was Opera Wonyosi, an adaptation of Bertolt Brecht’s The Threepenny Opera.
5. Soyinka has taught at numerous universities around the world, most recently as a literature professor at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.