Wole Soyinka Biography

The first African to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature is Wole Soyinka. He is a Nigerian novelist, poet and playwright. Soyinka’s life experiences are worth knowing. He was once a political prisoner placed in solitary confinement and spent years in the University of Leeds, Yale and Harvard. Soyinka’s vision is described as demanding but rewarding, transcendent and inspirational. As a poet, novelist and playwright, Soyinka's vision is seen through an impressive compilation of his works. At the University of Leeds in England, he spent six years earning his doctorate and from 1958 to 1959, he was a dramaturgist at the Royal Court Theatre in London. He was awarded a Rockefeller bursary in 1960 and returned to Nigeria to study African drama while teaching literature and drama at various universities in Lagos, Ibadan and Ife where he has been professor of comparative literature since 1975. He created the theatre group “The 1960 Masks” in 1960 and in 1964, he founded the “Orisun Theatre Company”, where he taken part as an actor and also produced his own plays. He has been a visiting professor at the universities of Yale, Cambridge and at different times. Soyinka pleaded in an article for cease-fire during the civil war in Nigeria and in 1967, he was arrested and was charged with conspiring with the Biafra rebels, and for 22 months, he was held as a political prisoner until 1969. Soyinka's passion for writing was eminent in his actions during his political imprisonment. He was denied writing and reading materials, but he developed his own ink and kept a prison diary written on cigarette packages, toilet paper and in between the lines of a few books he secretly acquired. Each piece of writing from the journal he managed to smuggle into the outside world became a literary proof and a reassurance to his supporters that he was still alive. Soyinka has held positions at Harvard, Cornell, Yale and Cambridge and he is recognized as one of the greatest dramatic imaginations of the 20th Century. Soyinka is considered as Africa's finest writer by many critics. His unique style of writing is a blend of European dramatic form and traditional Yoruba Folk Drama. His body of work is one of the first recordsof Africa's political agitation and its challenges to accommodate tradition with modernization. Soyinka cautions against overindulgence in either African irresponsibility. He warned against living in regret for Africa's past in Dance of the Forests. And ridicules Africa's foolish embrace of Western modernization in The Lion and the Jewel. His good sense of humor in his writings are inspired by the characteristics of a corrupt society such as the mediocre civil servants, the illiterate politicians, the affected and hypocritical university dons, the incompetent journalists, the brutal masses, aimless intellectuals, the vulgar and the corrupt businessmen.

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