Wole Soyinka, Nobel Prize-winning playwright and the occupant of the newly established Endowed Chair of Creative Writing at UNLV, will present a series of lectures on "Justice, Healing, and the African Renaissance" in early March.
The lectures are:
-- "Politics and the Theology of Healing" on March 1.
-- "Creativity Under Siege" on March 5.
-- "Renaissance and the Literary Vision" on March 7.
All of the lectures, which are free and open to the public, will take place at 4 p.m. in the auditorium of the Marjorie Barrick Museum of Natural History on the UNLV campus.
Soyinka, who joined the UNLV faculty this year, is a playwright, poet, novelist, essayist, and theater director. In 1986 he won the Nobel Prize for Literature.
Some of his writing stems from his imprisonment in his native Nigeria from 1967 to 1969 during that nation's civil war. Most of his time in prison was spent in solitary confinement. From this experience emerged his work, The Man Died, a book he composed on discarded cigarette packages, toilet paper, and between the lines of books he secretly acquired.
Soyinka writes mainly in English, but his works are distinguished by their exploration of "the African world view" and are steeped in Yoruba mythology, imagery, and dramatic idioms. Ake, his childhood biography, and his tragic drama, Death and the King's Horseman, have been acclaimed as classics. Other plays include The Strong Breed, The Lion and the Jewel, A Dance of the Forests, The Road, A Play of Giants, and Beatification of Area Boy. His adaptation of Euripedes' the Bacchae, was performed by Britain's National Theatre. Other adaptations include Brecht's Threepenny Opera, retitled Opera Wonyosi.
Idanre and Other Poems and Mandela's Earth and Other Poems are two of his books of poetry. His essay collections include "Myth, Literature, and the African World" and "The Open Sore of a Continent."
Among the recognitions he has received for his artistic endeavors are the Enrico Mattei Award for the Humanities, the Leopold Sedar Senghor Award for the Arts, the Benson Medal of the Royal Society for Literature, the Premio Grinzane Cavour, Italy's Premio Litterario Internazionalle Mondello, and the UNESCO Medal for the Arts.
Soyinka is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature of the United Kingdom, Academie Universelle des Cultures in France, the Academy of Arts and Letters in Germany, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Pan-African Writers Association, and the Association of Nigerian Authors.
He has held fellowship and professorial positions in theater and comparative literature at the Universities of Ibadan, Lagos, and Ife in Nigeria; the University of Legon in Ghana; and the universities of Sheffield and Cambridge in England; as well as at Yale, Cornell, Harvard, and Emory.
For more information on the lecture series or on Soyinka, call the English department at 895-3533.
