Wole Soyinka

Akinwande Oluwole Babatunde Soyinka was born in 1934 in Abeokuta, in south-western Nigeria, into a Yoruba Anglican family; his father was a school headmaster, and his childhood in the parsonage compound at Aké is recalled in one of his finest books. He studied at University College, Ibadan, and then in England at the University of Leeds, before working at the Royal Court Theatre in London, which staged his early work. Returning to Nigeria in 1960, the year of independence, he founded a theatre company and wrote A Dance of the Forests for the national celebrations — a play that warned the new nation against glorifying its past.

His drama draws on Yoruba myth, ritual, masquerade and song, above all on the figure of Ogun, god of iron and creativity, while engaging Greek tragedy and European modernism. The Lion and the Jewel is a comedy of village courtship; Death and the King’s Horseman turns a historical incident in colonial Nigeria into a tragedy of duty and cultural collision. His novel The Interpreters (1965) follows young Lagos intellectuals adrift after independence. During the civil war he was arrested by the federal government and held for twenty-two months, largely in solitary confinement — an ordeal recorded in the prison notes of The Man Died.

In 1986 he became the first sub-Saharan African writer to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature. Under the military dictatorship of Sani Abacha in the 1990s he went into exile and was charged with treason, returning after the regime’s end. He has taught at universities in Nigeria, Britain and the United States, and continues to write plays, poetry and political essays, as well as a series of memoirs that began with Aké: The Years of Childhood (1981).