Wole Soyinka

Wole Soyinka is a Nigerian writer, playwright and poet, born in 1934 into an Anglican Yoruba family in Aké, Abeokuta, who in 1986 became the first African laureate of the Nobel Prize in Literature. After studying at Ibadan and Leeds, he wrote plays such as The Swamp Dwellers and The Lion and the Jewel, and many of his works reflect Nigeria's history and political struggles. During the Nigerian Civil War the federal government declared him a traitor and imprisoned him for 22 months, the subject of his prison notes The Man Died (1972). His Nobel lecture, devoted to Nelson Mandela, was an outspoken criticism of apartheid; in 2024 the National Arts Theatre was renamed after him.