Born on the 13th July 1934 (age 88)
Abeokuta, Professor Akínwándé Olúwolé Babátúndé Sóyíinká popularly known as Wole Soyinka is a Nigerian playwright, novelist, poet, and essayist in the English language.

He was awarded the 1986 Nobel Prize in Literature, the first African to be honoured in that category.

AWARDS

•Nobel Prize in Literature
1986.

•Benson Medal from Royal Society of Literature
1990.

•Academy of Achievement Golden Plate Award
2009.

•Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, Lifetime Achievement
2012.

•Europe Theatre Prize - Special Prize
2017


LEGACIES AND HONOURS

•The Wole Soyinka Annual Lecture Series was founded in 1994 and "is dedicated to honouring one of Nigeria and Africa's most outstanding and enduring literary icons: Professor Wole Soyinka".
It is organised by the National Association of Seadogs (Pyrates Confraternity), which organisation Soyinka with six other students founded in 1952 at the then University College Ibadan.

•In 2011, the African Heritage Research Library and Cultural Centre built a writers' enclave in his honour. It is located in Adeyipo Village, Lagelu Local Government Area, Ibadan, Oyo State, Nigeria.
The enclave includes a Writer-in-Residence Programme that enables writers to stay for a period of two, three or six months, engaging in serious creative writing.

•In 2013, he visited the Benin Moat as the representative of UNESCO in recognition of the Naija seven Wonders project.
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.
He was appointed a patron of Humanists UK in 2020.

•In 2014, the collection Crucible of the Ages: Essays in Honour of Wole Soyinka at 80, edited by Ivor Agyeman-Duah and Ogochwuku Promise, was published by Bookcraft in Nigeria and Ayebia Clarke Publishing in the UK, with tributes and contributions from Nadine Gordimer, Toni Morrison, Ama Ata Aidoo, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Henry Louis Gates, Jr, Margaret Busby, Kwame Anthony Appiah, Ali Mazrui, Sefi Atta, and others.

•In 2018, Henry Louis Gates, Jr tweeted that Nigerian filmmaker and writer Onyeka Nwelue visited him in Harvard and was making a documentary film on Wole Soyinka.
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. 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

•1983: Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, United States

•1986: Nobel Prize for Literature

•1986: Agip Prize for Literature

•1986: Commander of the Order of the Federal Republic (CFR).

•1990: Benson Medal from Royal Society of Literature

•1993: Honorary doctorate, Harvard University

•2002: Honorary fellowship, SOAS

•2005: Honorary doctorate degree, Princeton University

•2005: Enstooled as the Akinlatun of Egbaland, a Nigerian chief, by the Oba Alake of the Egba clan of Yorubaland. Soyinka became a tribal aristocrat by way of this, one vested with the right to use the Yoruba title Oloye as a pre-nominal honorific.

•2009: Golden Plate Award of the American Academy of Achievement presented by Awards Council member Archbishop Desmond Tutu at an awards ceremony at St. George's Cathedral in Cape Town, South Africa

•2013: Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, Lifetime Achievement, United States

• 2014: International Humanist Award

•2017: Joins the University of Johannesburg, South Africa, as a Distinguished Visiting Professor in the Faculty of Humanities

•2017: "Special Prize" of the Europe Theatre Prize

•2018: University of Ibadan renamed its arts theater to Wole Soyinka Theatre.

•2018: Honorary Doctorate Degree of Letters, Federal University of Agriculture, Abeokuta (FUNAAB).

•2022: Honorary Degree from Cambridge University: This is a degree that is bestowed upon people who have made outstanding achievements in their respective fields.


Europe Theatre Prize

In 2017, he received the Special Prize of the Europe Theatre Prize, in Rome.
The Prize organization stated:

"A Special Prize is awarded to Wole Soyinka, writer, playwright and poet, Nobel Prize for literature in 1986, who with his work has been able to create an ideal bridge between Europe and Africa (...) With his art and his commitment, Wole Soyinka has contributed to a renewal of African cultural life, participating actively in the dialogue between Africa and Europe, touching on more and more urgent political themes and bringing, in English, richness and beauty to literature, theatre and action in Europe and the four corners of the world"



PLAYS

• Keffi's Birthday Treat (1954)

•The Invention (1957)

• The Swamp Dwellers (1958)

• A Quality of Violence (1959)[130]

•The Lion and the Jewel (1959)

• The Trials of Brother Jero (1960)

• A Dance of the Forests (1960)

• My Father's Burden (1960)

• The Strong Breed (1964)

•Before the Blackout (1964)

•Kongi's Harvest (1964)

• The Road (1965)

• Madmen and Specialists (1970)

• The Bacchae of Euripides (1973)

•Camwood on the Leaves (1973)

• Jero's Metamorphosis (1973)

• Death and the King's Horseman (1975)

• Opera Wonyosi (1977)

• Requiem for a Futurologist (1983)

• A Play of Giants (1984)

• Childe Internationale (1987)[131][132]

• From Zia with Love (1992)

• The Detainee (radio play)

• A Scourge of Hyacinths (radio play)

• The Beatification of Area Boy (1996)

• Document of Identity (radio play, 1999)

•King Baabu (2001)

•Etiki Revu Wetin

• Alapata Apata (2011)

•"Thus Spake Orunmila" (in Sixty-Six Books (2011)

NOVELS


•The Interpreters (1965)

• Season of Anomy (1973)

• Chronicles from the Land of the Happiest People on Earth (Bookcraft, Nigeria; Bloomsbury, UK; Pantheon, US, 2021)


SHORT STORIES

•A Tale of Two (1958)

•Egbe's Sworn Enemy (1960)

•Madame Etienne's Establishment (1960)


MEMOIRS

•The Man Died: Prison Notes (1972)

•Aké: The Years of Childhood (1981)

•Ibadan: The Penkelemes Years: a memoir 1945–1965 (1989)

• Ìsarà: A Voyage around Essay (1989)

•You Must Set Forth at Dawn (2006)


POETRY COLLECTIONS

•Telephone Conversation (1963) (appeared in Modern Poetry in Africa)

•Idanre and other poems (1967)

•A Big Airplane Crashed into The Earth (original title Poems from Prison) (1969)

• A Shuttle in the Crypt (1971)

• Ogun Abibiman (1976)

•Mandela's Earth and other poems (1988)

• Early Poems (1997)

•Samarkand and Other Markets I Have Known (2002)

ESSAYS

•"Towards a True Theater" (1962)

•Culture in Transition (1963)

•Neo-Tarzanism: The Poetics of Pseudo-Transition

• A Voice That Would Not Be Silenced

• Art, Dialogue, and Outrage: Essays on Literature and Culture (1988)

•From Drama and the African World View (1976)

•Myth, Literature, and the African World (1976)[135]

•The Blackman and the Veil (1990)[136]

•The Credo of Being and Nothingness (1991)

•The Burden of Memory – The Muse of Forgiveness (1999)

• A Climate of Fear (the BBC Reith Lectures 2004, audio and transcripts)

• New Imperialism (2009)

• Of Africa (2012)

•Beyond Aesthetics: Use, Abuse, and Dissonance in African Art Traditions (2019)

FILMS

• Kongi's Harvest

• Culture in Transition

•Blues for a Prodigal


TRANSLATIONS

•The Forest of a Thousand Demons: A Hunter’s Saga (1968; a translation of D. O. Fagunwa's Ògbójú Ọdẹ nínú Igbó Irúnmalẹ̀)

• In the Forest of Olodumare (2010; a translation of D. O. Fagunwa's Igbo Olodumare)

Source:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wole_Soyinka

Man of valour. The pride of literature

This thread is an insult to Wole Soyinka pls take it down. So many awards are even missing. Let's be careful not to compare Soyinka with these clowns around. He's the best to ever come out of Africa. The God of modern literature!


We can only mention Soyinka's name among the great men like Albert Einstein, Mary Currie, Isaac Newton, Williams Shakespeare etc....

They are comparing a one hit wonder with the most versatile writer on the African continent.
They are not even good enough to clean Soyinka's shoes.

Obidients left the group

This thread is a mockery of who Soyinka really is. Mods please ignore. Soyinka is far greater than what you have written up there. If this is an attempt to reply donut heads comparing Adichie then you have failed woefully. Because they can't be compared in the first place. We can treat their comparison as a feeble attempt of the 'defeated' to have a winning sense. The best is that we take our popcorns and watch their foolery develop into rising sun flag cariers. Soyinka has no comparison in Africa.

Odogwuzack:
This thread is an insult to Wole Soyinka pls take it down. So many awards are even missing. Let's be careful not to compare Soyinka with these clowns around. He's the best to ever come out of Africa. The God of modern literature!


We can only mention Soyinka's name among the great men like Albert Einstein, Mary Currie, Isaac Newton etc....

Correct!

In fact, after Williams Shakespeare (WS), nobody has played prominently in the world of literature like Wole Soyinka (WS).

He was also one time chair of committee of Nobel Laureates.

I remembered while I was a student at Ife and he was to be awarded Emeritus Professor, I was there when they were making photocopies of his CV. It was like a gigantic textbook. And to shock you, the CV was (updated) before he got the Nobel prize award.

There are so many I know that he referenced/sponsored through scholarship to Harvard university.

What about professors at Harvard, Cambridge, Oxford, etc that earned their professorship only working on his works. Those great profs are called Wole Soyinka's critics.

Charly boy and others are not educated, only full of emotion.

No comparison please, who do we compare with the first African Nobel prize winner in literature.

Just Trying to give cue to the GenZ and the likes

Guestlander:
They are comparing a one hit wonder with the most versatile writer on the African continent.
The are not even good enough to clean Soyinka's shoes.

Wow.

datola:


Correct!

In fact, after Williams Shakespeare (WS), nobody has played prominently in the world of literature like Wole Soyinka (WS).

He was also one time chair of committee of Nobel Laureates.

I remembered while I was a student at Ife and he was to be awarded Emeritus Professor, I was there when they were making photocopies of his CV. It was like a gigantic textbook. And to shock you, the CV was (updated) before he got the Nobel prize award.

There are so many I know that he referenced/sponsored through scholarship to Harvard university.

What about professors at Harvard, Cambridge, Oxford, etc that earned their professorship only working on his works. Those great profs are called Wole Soyinka's critics.

datola:


Correct!

In fact, after Williams Shakespeare (WS), nobody has played prominently in the world of literature like Wole Soyinka (WS).

He was also one time chair of committee of Nobel Laureates.

I remembered while I was a student at Ife and he was to be awarded Emeritus Professor, I was there when they were making photocopies of his CV. It was like a gigantic textbook. And to shock you, the CV was (updated) before he got the Nobel prize award.

There are so many I know that he referenced/sponsored through scholarship to Harvard university.

What about professors at Harvard, Cambridge, Oxford, etc that earned their professorship only working on his works. Those great profs are called Wole Soyinka's critics.

Thank you. Very well said.

Imagine comparing Wole Soyinka with someone whose biggest achievements are 18 Hononary Doctorate degrees lmaoo... This is what WS got tired of and stopped receiving from institutions across the globe many years ago.

Anybody that compares Soyinka with any of these noise makers around is just being mischievous.

Alo Marui has better credentials than these

muykem:
Charly boy and others are not educated, only full of emotion.

Because he is human being, unfortunately I don't know if you're one