Wole Soyinka

Soyinka studied in Ibadan and Leeds before working in London theater, then returned to Nigeria at independence to found theater companies and write the plays that made his name. During the Nigerian Civil War he was arrested for meeting with Biafran representatives in an attempt to broker peace, and spent twenty-two months in solitary confinement, an ordeal he later documented in the memoir The Man Died.

The Interpreters, published in 1965 and his only novel, followed a group of young Nigerian intellectuals drifting through Lagos nightlife after independence, their early idealism curdling into satire and disillusionment. Soyinka has remained primarily a dramatist and essayist across a career spanning dozens of plays, but the Nobel Prize in Literature he won in 1986 (the first awarded to any African writer) named him for the whole scope of that work. He has continued to speak out against Nigerian and African authoritarianism, at times from exile, into his old age.