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biography
| name: |
Soyinka, Wole
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popular name of Akinwande Oluwole Soyinka
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pronunciation:
[soyingka, wolay]
| sex:
| male
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| lived:
| (1934– )
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| biography:
| Writer, born near Abeokuta, SW Nigeria. He studied at Ibadan and Leeds, and became a play-reader at the Royal Court Theatre, where his first play, The Invention, was performed in 1955. After returning to Ibadan in 1959, he founded two theatre companies, and built up a new Nigerian drama, in English but using the words, music, and dance of the traditional Yoruba festivals. His writing is deeply concerned with the tension between old and new in modern Africa. His poetic collection A Shuttle in the Crypt (1972) appeared after his release in 1969 from two years of political detention. His first novel The Interpreters (1965), was called the first really modern African novel. The Open Sore of a Continent, his personal examination of the Nigerian crisis, appeared in 1996. He became professor of comparative literature at Ife in 1972, and professor of African studies and theatre at Cornell University in 1988. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1986. His later work includes The Burden of Memory, the Muse of Forgiveness (1998). |
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