Wole Soyinka

Wole Soyinka

Nigerian playwright, poet, novelist, and lecturer, whose writings draw on African tradition and mythology while employing Western literary forms. In 1986 Soyinka became the first African writer and the first black writer to win the Nobel Prize for literature.He established the 1960 Masks drama troupe (later the Orisun Theatre) and produced his own plays and those of other African playwrights. Soyinka often wrote about the need for individual freedom. His plays include A Dance of the Forests (1960), written to celebrate Nigeria’s independence in 1960; Kongi’s Harvest (1965), a political satire; 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), about a group of young Nigerian intellectuals, and Season of Anomy (1973); the poetry collections Idanre (1967) and Mandela’s Earth (1988); the critical work Myth, Literature, and the African World (1976); the autobiographical books Ake: The Years of Childhood (1981) and Isara (1989); and the essay collection The Credo of Being and Nothingness (1991).