Wole Soyinka
Nobel laureate, author, & human-rights activist

A prolific author of novels, plays, poetry, and criticism, Wole Soyinka is one of the most admired writers in the world today. He won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1986.

A native of Nigeria, Soyinka attended Government College and University College in Ibadan before graduating in English in 1957 from the University of Leeds, in England. He returned to Nigeria and founded a theater company. From 1960 to 1964 he was coeditor of Black Orpheus, a journal of African and black American literature and ideas. He has taught literature and drama at several African, European and American universities, among them Ibadan, Ife, and Lagos, Accra, Ghana, Cambridge, Cornell and Harvard.

His many works include The Lion and the Jewel; Myth, Literature and the African World; Death and the King’s Horseman; and AKE, The Years of Childhood. An activist for justice and human rights, Soyinka has suffered for his principles. He was jailed in 1967–69 for allegedly conspiring to aid the attempted secession of Biafra from Nigeria. The Man Died (1972) is his account of his arrest and imprisonment. More recently, his BBC Reith lectures on political violence in today's world and the threat it poses to human dignity were published as Climate of Fear: The Quest for Dignity in a Dehumanized World.