Literary icon, Wole Soyinka, clocked 83 on Thursday.
Known for his seminal writings and hard-hitting public comments, the international man of letters is celebrated at home and abroad.
We present 10 important things to know about him
- Akinwande Oluwole Babatunde Soyinka was born on July 13, 1934 in Abeokuta, the Ogun State capital as the second of six children
- Although his father, Samuel Ayodele Soyinka, was an Anglican minister and headmaster of St. Peters School, Abeokuta, and his mother, Grace Eniola Soyinka, a strong member of the Church, Soyinka is not a Christian.
- He began his formal education at St. Peters Primary School and went to Abeokuta Grammar School before he was accepted by Government College in Ibadan, at that time one of Nigeria’s elite secondary schools.
- In 1952, he began studies at University College Ibadan where he and six others founded the Pyrates Confraternity, an anti-corruption and justice-seeking student organisation, the first confraternity in Nigeria. Later in 1954, Soyinka relocated to England, where he continued his studies in English literature at the University of Leeds.
- His first plays – The Swamp Dwellers and The Lion and the Jewel – were performed at Ibadan in 1958 and 1959 and were published in 1963.
- Soyinka wrote the first full-length play produced on Nigerian television. Titled My Father’s Burden and directed by Segun Olusola, the play was featured on the Western Nigeria Television (WNTV) on August 6, 1960.
- Following the military coup of January 1966, he secretly and unofficially met with the military governor Chukwuemeka Odumegwu Ojukwu in the southeastern town of Enugu in August 1967 to try to avert the Nigerian civil war. As a result, he had to go into hiding. He was later imprisoned by the Nigerian government for 22 months ending in 1969.
- Soyinka has published about 20 works: drama, novels and poetry. He writes in English and his literary language is marked by great scope and richness of words.
- He became the first African to be awarded a Nobel Prize for Literature in 1986.
- Soyinka has been married three times and divorced twice with children from all three marriages. His first marriage to the late British writer, Barbara Dixon, mother of his first son, Olaokun was in 1958. His second marriage was to Olaide Idowu with whom he had three daughters, Moremi, Iyetade (deceased), Peyibomi, and a son, Ilemakin. In 1989, Soyinka married Folake Doherty, who remains his wife till date.
