Wole Soyinka

African authors – writing for the world

Gail Collins outlines the growth of African literature, from the 18th century to modern times.

15 April 2021

In 1761, a small child, Phillis Wheatley (as renamed by the family she worked for) was captured and taken from her home in West Africa to Boston in the US. Fortunately, she landed in the arms of a benevolent family who taught her to read and write but they would have been totally unaware that this would lead her to become the first African to have work published in the UK and US with her collection of poetry – Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral – in 1773.

 

Abdulrazak Gurnah, Tanzanian, writer, novelist, academic, portrait, Modena, Italy, 6th April 2006. (Photo by Leonardo Cendamo/Getty Images)

“The Nobel Returns Home”: Wole Soyinka on Abdulrazak Gurnah’s Nobel Prize Win

by CHUKWUEBUKA IBEH

October 07, 2021

The 2021 Nobel Prize for Literature has just been awarded to Tanzanian novelist Abdulrazak Gurnah. He is the seventh African to receive this honor.

The announcement was made earlier today October 7, 2021, after a closed-door deliberation by members of The Swedish Academy.

BOOK OF THE DAY

Chronicles from the Land of the Happiest People on Earth by Wole Soyinka review – a vast danse macabre

The Nigerian writer’s first novel in nearly 50 years is a vivid, shocking story of political corruption in a country much like his homeland

Legends of the fall / The 50 biggest books of autumn 2021

Wole Soyinka to publish first novel in almost 50 years

Ben Okri

Monday 27 September 2021

W

ole Soyinka’s new novel tells the multidimensional story of a secret society dealing in human parts for sacrificial uses, whose members encompass the highest political and religious figures in the land. It details how the conspiracy and cover-up of this quasi-organisation affect not only the life of the nation but, more specifically, the lives of four friends. This is essentially a whistleblower’s book. It is a novel that explodes criminal racketeering of a most sinister and deadly kind that is operating in an African nation uncomfortably like Nigeria. It is a vivid and wild romp through a political landscape riddled with corruption and opportunism and a spiritual landscape riddled with fraudulence and, even more disquietingly, state-sanctioned murder. This is a novel written at the end of an artist’s tether. It has gone beyond satire. It is a vast danse macabre. It is the work of an artist who finally has found the time and the space to unleash a tale about all that is rotten in the state of Nigeria. No one else can write such a book and get away with it and still live and function in the very belly of the horrors revealed. But then no other writer has Soyinka’s unique positioning in the political and cultural life of his nation.

Wole Soyinka, pictured in Paris in 2017. Photograph: Thomas Samson

 

Wole Soyinka to publish first novel in almost 50 years

Chronicles of the Happiest People on Earth will be released this year, with the 86-year-old author also planning fresh theatre work after ‘continuous writing’ in lockdown

Alison Flood

Wed 28 October 2020

Wole Soyinka has used his time in lockdown to write his first novel in almost 50 years.

The Nigerian playwright and poet, who became the first African to win the Nobel prize for literature in 1986, published his widely celebrated debut novel, The Interpreters, in 1965. His second and most recent novel, Season of Anomy, was released in 1973.