Professor wale soyinka biography
Home / General Biography Information / Professor wale soyinka biography
Powered by 24hubs
The Road (produced London, 1965; also director: produced Chicago, 1984). His father, Samuel Ayodele Soyinka, was a prominent Anglican minister and headmaster.
Career: Play reader, Royal Court Theatre, London, 1957-59; Rockefeller Research Fellow in drama, University of Ibadan, 1961-62; lecturer in English, University of Ife, Ile-Ife, 1963-64; senior lecturer in English, University of Lagos, 1965-67; head of the department of theater arts, University of Ibadan, 1969-72 (appointment made in 1967); professor of comparative literature, and head of the department of dramatic arts, University of Ife, 1975-85.
As part of efforts to mark his 84th birthday, a collection of poems titled 84 Delicious Bottles of Wine was published for Wole Soyinka, edited by Onyeka Nwelue and Odega Shawa. The narrative follows the attempts by Ofeyi, a marketing genius who works for a nameless cartel controlling the government, to subvert his employers' social and economic power by introducing a counter-philosophy he discovers at the agricultural community of Aiyéró, which is collectivist, peaceful, native, and benign.
Soyinka's narrative remains somewhat non-linear throughout the book, preferring to follow multiple threads of event and history.
The Interpreters traces the dissolution and despair often brought about by post-colonial states of cultural hybridity and uncertainty.
While Season of Anomy also remains uncertain at its conclusion, it takes up the duplicitous situations of post-colonial life and attempts to suggest tentative social, political, and imaginative resolutions.
If you see something that doesn't look right, contact us! 1984.
From Zia with Love. London, Methuen, 1992
The Beatification of Area Boy: A Lagosian Kaleidoscope. London, Methuen Drama, 1995.
Screenplay:
Kongi's Harvest, 1970.
Radio Plays:
Camwood on the Leaves, 1960; The Detainee, 1965; Die Still, Dr.
Godspeak, 1981; A Scourge of Hyacinths, 1990; Nineteen Ninety-Four, 1993.
Television Plays:
Joshua: A Nigerian Portrait, 1962 (Canada); Culture in Transition, 1963 (USA).
Poetry
Idanre and Other Poems. London, Methuen, 1967; New York, Hill and Wang, 1968.
Poems from Prison. London, Collings, 1969.
A Shuttle in the Crypt. London, Eyre Methuen-Collings, and New York, Hill and Wang, 1972.
Ogun Abibimañ.
PUBLICATIONS
Novels
The Interpreters. London, Deutsch, 1965; New York, Macmillan, 1970.
Season of Anomy. London, Collings, 1973; New York, Third Press, 1974.
Plays
The Swamp Dwellers (produced London, 1958; New York, 1968). London, Eyre Methuen, 1973; New York, Norton, 1974.
Collected Plays: A Dance of the Forests, The Swamp Dwellers, The Strong Breed, The Road, The Bacchae. London and New York, Oxford University Press, 1973.
Collected Plays:The Lion and the Jewel, Kongi's Harvest, The Trials of Brother Jero, Jero's Metamorphosis, Madmen and Specialists. London and New York, Oxford University Press, 1974.
Camwood on the Leaves, and Before the Blackout: Two Short Plays. New York, Third Press, 1974.
Death and the King's Horseman (also director: produced Ile-Ife, 1976; Chicago, 1979; also director: produced New York, 1987).
He 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. Among the notable contributors was Adamu Usman Garko, award-winning teenage essayist, poet and writer.
1973: Honorary D.Litt., University of Leeds
1973–74: Overseas Fellow, Churchill College, Cambridge
1983: Elected an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature (Hon.
After the election on March 28, 2015, he said that Nigerians must show a Nelson Mandela–like ability to forgive president-elect Muhammadu Buhari’s past as an iron-fisted military ruler, according to Bloomberg.com.
Personal Life
Soyinka has been married three times. Barbara was the mother of his first son, Olaokun, and his daughter Morenike.
He studied English literature, Greek, and Western history. In 2013, he visited the Benin Moat as the representative of UNESCO in recognition of the Naija seven Wonders project. In fact, that lack of ease or stability gives his writing its energy and its vital interest.
The Interpreters opens with a complex nightclub scene which sets the tone for the rest of the novel.
Myth, Literature and the African World (1975) is a collection of Soyinka’s literary essays.
“Against my rational instincts, I believe that we have here a genuine case of a born-again democrat,” he said. In 1986, the playwright and political activist became the first African to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature.