1934-07-13 Wole Soyinka, a talented, ingenious Nigerian playwright, poet, novelist, and lecturer, was born on this date in 1934. Originally named Akinwande Oluwole Soyinka, Wole studied at the University College of Ibadan and graduated from the University of Leeds in Britain in 1958. He then returned to Nigeria, where he established the 1960 Masks Drama Troupe (later the Orisun Theatre) and produced his own plays and works of other African playwrights. Soyinkas writings describe tribal myths and traditions while employing Western literary forms. During the Nigerian civil war, he was arrested by the government and held in solitary confinement for two years. A collection of his verse, Poems from Prison (1969), republished as A Shuttle in the Crypt (1972), and the prose work The Man Died (1972) were inspired during and after his incarceration. Soyinka often wrote about the need for individual freedom. His plays include A Dance of the Forests (1960), Kongi’s Harvest (1965), Death and the King’s Horseman (1975), A Play of Giants (1984), and From Zia, with Love (1992). His other writings include the novels The Interpreters (1965) and Season of Anomy (1973). His poetry collections include Idanre (1967) and Mandela’s Earth (1988), and his works of criticism, Myth, Literature, and the African World (1976); the autobiographical works Ake: The Years of Childhood (1981) and Isara (1989); and the essay collection The Credo of Being and Nothingness (1991). In 1986, Soyinka became both the first African writer and the first Black writer to win the Nobel Prize for literature. Soyinka went into exile in 1994, following the cancellation of Nigeria’s 1993 democratic elections and the assumption of power by a military dictatorship. In 1997, Nigeria’s regime charged Soyinka with treason. The next year those charges were lifted and he returned home in October of 1998. Reference: The World Book Encyclopedia. Copyright 1996, World Book, Inc. ISBN 0-7166-0096-X
Posted on: Sun, 13 Jul 2014 10:39:55 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015