Narrative Landscape Press

Playwright, poet, author, teacher and political activist, Wole Soyinka became the first African to receive a Nobel Prize for Literature in 1986.

Born Akinwande Oluwole Babatunde Soyinka on July 13, 1934, in Abeokuta, western Nigeria. His father, Samuel Ayodele Soyinka, was a prominent Anglican minister and headmaster; while his mother, Grace Eniola Soyinka, whom he nicknamed “Wild Christian,” was a shopkeeper and local activist. As a child, Wole Soyinka was precocious and inquisitive, he lived in an Anglican mission compound, learning the Christian teachings of his parents, as well as the Yoruba spiritualism and tribal customs of his grandfather.

After completing preparatory university studies in 1954 at Government College in Ibadan, Soyinka moved to England and continued his education at the University of Leeds, where he served as the editor of the school’s magazine, The Eagle. He graduated with a bachelor’s degree in English literature in 1958. In 1972, the university awarded him an honorary doctorate.

In the late 1950s Soyinka wrote his first important play, A Dance of the Forests, which satirised the Nigerian political elite. From 1958 to 1959, Soyinka was a dramaturgist at the Royal Court Theatre in London. In 1960, he was awarded a Rockefeller fellowship and returned to Nigeria to study African drama. At the same time, he taught drama and literature at various universities in Ibadan, Lagos, and Ife. In 1960, he founded the theatre group, The 1960 Masks, and in 1964, the Orisun Theatre Company, in which he produced his own plays and performed as an actor.

During the civil war in Nigeria, Soyinka appealed in an article for cease-fire and was arrested in 1967, accused of conspiring with the Biafra rebels; he was held as a political prisoner for 22 months until 1969. A few years after his release, he published a book chronicling the experience titled, The Man Died: The Prison Notes of Wole Soyinka.

Through his works of fiction, poetry, plays and mostly non-fiction, Soyinka has documented the struggles of his homeland Nigeria, the African continent and the world at large.

He has periodically been a visiting professor at the universities in Europe, North America and the Far East. To this day, Wole Soyinka continues to write and remains an uncompromising critic of corruption and oppression where he finds them.