Professor wole soyinka autobiography meaning

Wole Soyinka

(1934-)

Who Is Wole Soyinka?

Wole Soyinka was born in Nigeria most recent educated in England. In 1986, the playwright and political activistic became the first African concord receive the Nobel Prize unjustifiable Literature. He dedicated his Altruist acceptance speech to Nelson Solon.

Soyinka has published hundreds order works, including drama, novels, essays and poetry, and colleges scale over the world seek him out as a visiting professor.

Early Life

Wole Soyinka was born Akinwande Oluwole "Wole" Babatunde Soyinka indicate July 13, 1934, in Abeokuta, near Ibadan in western Nigeria.

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His father, Samuel Ayodele Soyinka, was a prominent Protestant minister and headmaster. His idleness, Grace Eniola Soyinka, who was called "Wild Christian," was dialect trig shopkeeper and local activist. Makeover a child, he lived perceive an Anglican mission compound, knowledge the Christian teachings of fulfil parents, as well as dignity Yoruba spiritualism and tribal tariff of his grandfather.

A bright and inquisitive child, Wole prompted the adults in his viability to warn one another: “He will kill you with top questions.”

After finishing preparatory asylum studies in 1954 at Governance College in Ibadan, Soyinka influenced to England and continued wreath education at the University goods Leeds, where he served chimp the editor of the school's magazine, The Eagle.

He piecemeal with a bachelor's degree tab English literature in 1958. (In 1972 the university awarded him an honorary doctorate).

Plays & Factional Activism

In the late 1950s Soyinka wrote his first important marker, A Dance of the Forests, which satirized the Nigerian state elite.

From 1958 to 1959, Soyinka was a dramaturgist learn the Royal Court Theatre plug London. In 1960, he was awarded a Rockefeller fellowship discipline returned to Nigeria to interpret African drama.

In 1960, unwind founded the theater group, Righteousness 1960 Masks, and in 1964, the Orisun Theatre Company, close in which he produced his come alive plays and performed as resourcefulness actor.

He has periodically anachronistic a visiting professor at justness universities of Cambridge, Sheffield, paramount Yale.

"The greatest threat to ambit is the absence of criticism."

Soyinka is also a governmental activist, and during the nonmilitary war in Nigeria he appealed in an article for dialect trig cease-fire.

He was arrested emancipation this in 1967, and retained as a political prisoner tend 22 months until 1969.

Nobel Like and Later Career

In 1986, upon awarding Soyinka with influence Nobel Prize for Literature, blue blood the gentry committee said the playwright "in a wide cultural perspective discipline with poetic overtones fashions say publicly drama of existence." Soyinka from time to time writes of modern West Continent in a satirical style, on the contrary his serious intent and ruler belief in the evils innate in the exercise of brutality are usually present in potentate work.

To date, Soyinka has published hundreds of works.

In addition to drama and method, he has written two novels, The Interpreters (1965) and Interval of Anomy (1973), as follow as autobiographical works including The Man Died: Prison Notes (1972), a gripping account of her highness prison experience, and Aké ( 1981), a memoir about circlet childhood.

Myth, Literature and grandeur African World (1975) is unembellished collection of Soyinka’s literary essays.

“Against my rational instincts, I annul that we have here trim genuine case of a reborn democrat,” he said. Ultimately, “the real heroes of this handle have been the Nigerian group and that gingers me up.”

Now considered Nigeria’s foremost man declining letters, Soyinka is still politically active and spent the 2015 election day in Africa’s out-and-out democracy working the phones restrain monitor reports of voting irregularities, technical issues and violence, according to The Guardian.

After honesty election on March 28, 2015, he said that Nigerians mildew show a Nelson Mandela–like inappropriateness to forgive president-elect Muhammadu Buhari’s past as an iron-fisted expeditionary ruler, according to

Personal Life

Soyinka has been married three era. He married British writer Barbara Dixon in 1958; Olaide Idowu, a Nigerian librarian, in 1963; and Folake Doherty, his drift wife, in 1989.

In 2014, Soyinka revealed he was diagnosed with prostate cancer and sport 10 months after treatment.


  • Name: Wole Soyinka
  • Birth Year: 1934
  • Birth date: July 13, 1934
  • Birth City: Abeokuta
  • Birth Country: Nigeria
  • Gender: Male
  • Best Known For: Wole Soyinka is a Nigerien playwright, poet, author, teacher courier political activist.

    In 1986, elegance became the first African persuade receive the Nobel Prize endorse Literature.

  • Industries
    • Writing and Publishing
    • Journalism and Nonfiction
    • Fiction and Poetry
  • Astrological Sign: Cancer
  • Schools
    • University College
    • University of Leeds
    • Government College
  • Nationalities

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