Playwright and theatre director Wole Oguntokun has died.
He was 56 years old.
Multiple sources confirmed the death to QEDNG.
Mr Oguntokun died in Canada on Wednesday after a brief illness.
Born on 15 July 1967, Oguntokun was a board member of Theaturtle, a Canadian theatre company.
The Obafemi Awolowo University (OAU) graduate produced and wrote the TV sitcoms Crossworld Blues on DBN TV in 1999 and Living Free on MBI television in 2002.
He also produced the television show on current affairs The Cutting Edge, aired on MBI in 2002, and Season II of the ‘Pan-African talk show Moments’ with Mo. He briefly produced Season IV as well.
Oguntokun wrote and produced a documentary on inner-city violence affecting young females titled ‘The Sounds of Silence’, commissioned by the Ajegunle Community Project (ACP) in 2009.
He was also a member of the Governing Council of the Committee for Relevant Art (CORA), a leading Arts and Culture Advocacy Group in Nigeria.
The playwright was a culture consultant and dialect coach for the Stratford Festival’s 2022 production of Death and the King’s Horseman by Wole Soyinka.
Oguntokun also directed three Muson Festival Plays: The Gods Are Not To Blame (2006), An Ordinary Legacy (2012) and his own adaptation of Cyprian Ekwensi’s Jagua Nana (2014).
In March 2007, he began ‘The Girl Whisperer’, a weekly column on gender relations in the Sunday Guardian, which ran for seven years.
In 2021, he won the Young-Howze Award for Dramatic Writing of the Year for his play ‘The Emancipation of Yankee Oluwale’, based on the trial of two English policemen in 1969 for the death of the Nigerian migrant, David Oluwale.
