70 Facts About Wole Soyinka

Wole Soyinka is a Nigerian author, best known as a playwright and poet.

Wole Soyinka has written three novels, ten collections of short stories, seven poetry collection, twenty five plays and five memoirs.

Wole Soyinka wrote two translated works and many articles and short stories for many newspapers and periodicals.

Wole Soyinka is widely regarded as one of Africa's greatest writers and one of the world's most important dramatists.

Wole Soyinka was awarded the 1986 Nobel Prize in Literature for his "wide cultural perspective and poetic overtones fashioning the drama of existence".

Wole Soyinka left Nigeria for England to study at the University of Leeds.

Wole Soyinka wrote many plays which were performed in radios and theatres in Nigeria and UK especially the Royal Court Theatre.

Wole Soyinka wrote many satirical pieces, which he used to appeal to a wide public and sold in large numbers.

Wole Soyinka is a poet; he did well in the writing poems and poetry collections.

Wole Soyinka was born on 13 July 1934, and was the second of seven children: Atinuke Aina, Femi, Yeside, Omofolabo Ajayi, and Kayode.

Wole Soyinka had his secondary education at Abeokuta Grammar School and university preparatory studies at Government College, Ibadan from 1946 to 1951.

Wole Soyinka was admitted into the University College Ibadan, where he studied English literature, Greek, and Western history from 1952 to 1954.

Wole Soyinka wrote many short stories, which in 1957, he won the annual oratory competition run by the University.

Wole Soyinka wrote and published his first play The Swamp Dwellers in 1958.

The play is a comedy and because it attracted interest from many members of London's Royal Court Theatre, Wole Soyinka had to move to London.

Wole Soyinka worked as a play reader for the Royal Court Theatre.

Wole Soyinka wrote poems including "The Immigrant" and "My Next Door Neighbour", which appeared in Black Orpheus.

Wole Soyinka returned to Nigeria after he received a Rockefeller Research Fellowship for his research on African theatre.

Wole Soyinka wrote his first full-length play entitled My Father's Burden.

Wole Soyinka wrote essays that defended Nigerian literacy, among them, "Death and the King's Horsemen", and "Towards a True Theater", which was published by Transition Magazine.

Along other professionals, Wole Soyinka founded the Drama Association of Nigeria.

Wole Soyinka was released after some months of confinement, as a result of protests by the international community of writers.

Wole Soyinka wrote The Detainee, a radio play for BBC in London.

Wole Soyinka was promoted to senior lecturer in the department of English language of University of Lagos.

In 1958 Wole Soyinka married British writer Barbara Dixon, whom he met while studying at the University of Leeds in the 1950s.

Wole Soyinka married Folake Doherty in 1989 and had three sons: Tunlewa, Bojode and Eniara.

From 1975 to 1999, Wole Soyinka served as a Professor of Comparative literature at Obafemi Awolowo University.

Wole Soyinka served as scholar-in-residence at New York University's Institute of African American Affairs and at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, California.

Wole Soyinka has taught at the universities of Cambridge, Oxford, Harvard and Yale.

Wole Soyinka was a Distinguished Scholar in Residence at Duke University in 2008.

In December 2017, Wole Soyinka received the Europe Theatre Prize in the "Special Prize" category, awarded to someone who has "contributed to the realization of cultural events that promote understanding and the exchange of knowledge between peoples".

Wole Soyinka was arrested by federal authorities and imprisoned for 22 months, as civil war ensued between the Federal government of Nigeria and the secessionist state of Biafra.

Wole Soyinka wrote a significant body of poems and notes criticising the Nigerian government while in prison.

Wole Soyinka published a collection of his poetry, Idanre and Other Poems, which was inspired by his visit to the sanctuary of the Yoruba deity Ogun, whom he regards as his "companion" deity, kindred spirit, and protector.

Wole Soyinka wrote The Bacchae of Euripides, a reworking of the Pentheus myth.

Wole Soyinka soon published in London a book of poetry, Poems from Prison.

Wole Soyinka travelled to Paris, France, to take the lead role as Patrice Lumumba, the murdered first Prime Minister of the Republic of the Congo, in Joan Littlewood's May 1971 production of Murderous Angels, Conor Cruise O'Brien's play about the Congo Crisis.

Wole Soyinka was awarded an Honoris Causa doctorate by the University of Leeds in 1973.

From 1973 to 1975, Wole Soyinka spent time on scientific studies.

Wole Soyinka spent a year as a visiting fellow at Churchill College, Cambridge and wrote Death and the King's Horseman, which had its first reading at Churchill College.

In 1975, Wole Soyinka was promoted to the position of editor for Transition Magazine, which was based in the Ghanaian capital of Accra, where he moved for some time.

Wole Soyinka used his columns in the magazine to criticise the "negrophiles" and military regimes.

Wole Soyinka protested against the military junta of Idi Amin in Uganda.

Wole Soyinka delivered a series of guest lectures at the Institute of African Studies at the University of Ghana in Legon.

In 1981 Wole Soyinka published his autobiographical work Ake: The Years of Childhood, which won a 1983 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award.

Wole Soyinka criticized the corruption in the government of the democratically elected President Shehu Shagari.

When Shagari was replaced by the army general Muhammadu Buhari, Wole Soyinka was often at odds with the military.

Wole Soyinka was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1986, becoming the first African laureate.

Wole Soyinka was described as one "who in a wide cultural perspective and with poetic overtones fashions the drama of existence".

Reed Way Dasenbrock writes that the award of the Nobel Prize in Literature to Wole Soyinka is "likely to prove quite controversial and thoroughly deserved".

Wole Soyinka's speech was an outspoken criticism of apartheid and the politics of racial segregation imposed on the majority by the National South African government.

In 1993 Wole Soyinka was awarded an honorary doctorate from Harvard University.

In November 1994, Wole Soyinka fled from Nigeria on a motorcycle via the border with Benin, and then went to the United States.

Wole Soyinka became the organization's second president from 1997 to 2000.

In 1999 a new volume of poems by Wole Soyinka, entitled Outsiders, was released.

Wole Soyinka supported the freedom of worship but warned against the consequence of the illogic of allowing religions to preach apocalyptic violence.

Wole Soyinka served as scholar-in-residence at NYU's Institute of African American Affairs.

In November 2022, during a public presentation of his two-volume collection of essays, Wole Soyinka said in relation to religion:.

Around July 2023, Wole Soyinka came under severe criticism, after writing an open letter to the Emir of Ilorin, Ibrahim Sulu-Gambari, over the cancellation of the Isese festival proposed by an Osun priestess, Omolara Olatunji.

The funding supported Wole Soyinka's publishing and the global production of some of his theatre plays.

The book states that even after the CIA's covert role in some of these initiatives was revealed in the 1960s, Wole Soyinka had "unusually close ties to the US government even to the point of frequently meeting with US intelligence in the late 1970s".

Nigerian academic Adekeye Adebajo has argued in the Johannesburg Review of Books that Davis does not directly accuse Wole Soyinka of being a CIA agent and as a result Wole Soyinka's denials are misdirected.

Scholars, including Adeniran, has noted that Wole Soyinka's writings reflect his life.

Wole Soyinka is currently the consultant for the Lagos Black Heritage Festival, with the Lagos State deeming him as the only person who could bring out the aims and objectives of the Festival to the people.

Wole Soyinka was appointed a patron of Humanists UK in 2020.

Wole Soyinka won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award in 1983 and 2013.

Wole Soyinka rejected an honorary degree from the University of Ibadan.

Wole Soyinka was confered the Commander of the Order of the Federal Republic by the military head of state, Ibrahim Babangida.

Wole Soyinka is a tribal aristocrat; one vested with the right to use the Yoruba title Oloye as a pre-nominal honorific.

Wole Soyinka was honored with the Golden Plate Award by the American Academy of Achievement.