Nigerian playwright, poet, novelist, and essayist — the first African writer to win the Nobel Prize in Literature (1986), and one of the few major 20th-century writers who has been imprisoned more than once by his own government for his political statements. Soyinka was born in Abeokuta to a Yoruba Anglican family, read English at Ibadan and Leeds, apprenticed at the Royal Court Theatre in London in the late 1950s, and returned to Nigeria on independence in 1960 to write the plays — A Dance of the Forests (1960, written for the independence celebrations and refusing their triumphalism), The Lion and the Jewel (1963), The Road (1965), Kongi's Harvest (1965) — that made him the founding figure of modern Anglophone African theater.
His work is grounded in Yoruba cosmology — particularly the figure of Ogun, the god of iron, creativity, and the transformative will — which Soyinka elaborates at length in Myth, Literature and the African World (1976). Against Ngũgĩ's argument that African writers should abandon European languages, Soyinka defended English as a conquered instrument African writers had earned the right to use on their own terms — a quarrel that has run for decades without settling.
The political record is its own story. He was arrested in 1965 for a radio station takeover protesting a rigged election; during the 1967–70 Biafran War he was imprisoned without trial for twenty-two months, mostly in solitary confinement, for trying to broker peace between the Nigerian government and the Biafran secessionists. The Man Died (1972) is the prison memoir. Under the Sani Abacha dictatorship in the 1990s he fled into exile and was sentenced to death in absentia; he returned after Abacha's death in 1998. You Must Set Forth at Dawn (2006) is the major political memoir; the novel Chronicles from the Land of the Happiest People on Earth (2021), his first in almost fifty years, is a savage satire of contemporary Nigerian power.