Lagos, Nigeria THE Nobel Prize in Literature was presented to Mario Vargas Llosa at an awards ceremony on Friday in Oslo. This reawakened the disappointment felt by many fans of African literature, who had hoped that this would be the year for the Kenyan writer Ngugi wa Thiong'o. But there's actually reason to celebrate Mr. Ngugi's loss. African...

YOU MUST SET FORTH AT DAWN A Memoir. By Wole Soyinka. 499 pp. Random House. $26.95. IT was never going to be easy for Wole Soyinka. An aspiring playwright with deep roots in his Yoruba home country, highly educated, with passionate expectations for a free and democratic Nigerian state, he was at university in Britain during the years just preceding...

''Hey, the Queen is here,'' shouted Henry Louis Gates Jr. as Toni Morrison walked into the ''living room'' of the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard. ''This will go down in the annals of African-American history,'' the exuberant Mr. Gates continued, taking in the excited guests beginning to assemble in the reception room. Mr. Gates,...
Wole Soyinka (født 13. juli 1934) er en digter og forfatter fra Nigeria som vandt Nobelprisen i litteratur i 1986
Akinwande Oluwole "Wole" Soyinka blev født i Abeokuta i nærheden af Ibadan i det vestlige Nigeria af en Yoruba familie.
Han studerede på universiteterne i Ibadan og Leeds (i England), og har senere undervist i litteratur og drama på de nigerianske universiteter i Ibadan, Lagos og Ife.
Han er en politisk engageret figur, var fængslet af militærdiktaturet 1967-69 og måtte gå i eksil flere gange. Nutidags lever og arbejder han mest i USA.