Professor Wole Soyinka is a Nigerian playwright, poet, and essayist renowned as one of Africa’s most distinguished literary figures. He became the first African to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1986, recognized for his work that “in a wide cultural perspective and with poetic overtones fashions the drama of existence.”

Soyinka studied English literature at University College Ibadan and later at the University of Leeds in England. In the 1960s, he returned to Nigeria, where he worked as a lecturer and began a prolific career in drama and writing. His early plays, such as A Dance of the Forests (1960), blend Yoruba mythology with Western literary traditions.

Soyinka was imprisoned for 22 months during the Nigerian Civil War. He wrote extensively during his incarceration, and his prison memoir, The Man Died (1972), became a powerful indictment of political injustice.

Soyinka’s notable works include the plays Death and the King’s Horseman (1975), The Lion and the Jewel (1959), and the autobiographical Aké: The Years of Childhood (1981).