Wole Soyinka
Winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1986, Wole Soyinka has published more than thirty works, and continues to be active on various international artistic and Human Rights organizations such as the International Theatre Institute, the UN Commision on Human Rights and the International Parliament of Writers of which he was the immediate past President. A Yoruba born in Western Nigeria and educated in Ibadan, Wole Soyinka continued his studies at the University of Leeds, England, earning an Honours degree in English, then joined the Royal Court Theatre, London, as a play-reader. In 1960, he was awarded a Rockefeller grant and returned to Nigeria, where he researched theatre, and founded a theatre company.
Soyinka’s first plays, The Swamp Dwellers and The Lion and the Jewel, were written in Leeds and London, first performed at Ibadan in 1959, with The Lion and the Jewel receiving its London premiere at the Royal Court Theatre, London in the sixties. His later play, Death and the Kings Horseman has been produced all over the world, including at the National Theater in London in 2009, at Lincoln Center in New York City and in 2022 at the Stratford Festival in Canada. Other works for theater have included The Trials of Brother Jero, Jero’s Metamorphosis, A Dance of the Forests, Kongi’s Harvest, Madmen and Specialists, The Strong Breed, The Road, A Play of Giants, Requiem for a Futurologist. He has adapted The Bacchae for the British National Theatre where it was performed under the title The Bacchae of Euripides, Opera Wonyosi from John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera and Bertolt Brecht’s The Threepenny Opera, set in an African context, and King Baabu from Alfred Jarry’s King Ubu. His adaptation has been described as taking Ubu’s savage satire to the limits of the grotesque.
Soyinka has written three novels, The Interpreters, Season of Anomy and Chronicles from the Land of the Happiest People on Earth was published in 2023, listed as a NY Times Notable Book of the Year. Autobiographical works include The Man Died: Prison Notes and Aké: The Years of Childhood and IBADAN, The Penkelemes Years. Literary essays are collected in, among others, Myth, Literature and the African World and Art, Dialogue and Outrage while his political and other thematic writings are contained in The Open Sore of a Continent and The Burden of Memory, Muse of Forgiveness. His poems are collected in Idanre and Other Poems, Poems from Prison, A Shuttle in the Crypt, Ogun Abibiman, Mandela’s Earth and Other Poems, SAMARKAND and Other Markets I have Known. Wole Soyinka has held several university positions and still lectures extensively.
