Nobel Prize-winning playwright Wole Soyinka has been appointed to the newly created Endowed Chair of Creative Writing at UNLV.
A playwright, poet, novelist, essayist, and theater director, Soyinka won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1986.
Some of Soyinka's 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.
Earlier this year he was awarded an honorary doctor of humane letters degree by UNLV because of his achievements as a statesman, an artist, and a contributor to the international dialogue on human rights -- accomplishments stemming primarily from his creative works.
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.
His collected poems have been published under several titles, including "Idanre and Other Poems," "A Shuttle in the Crypt," and "Mandela's Earth and Other Poems." His essay collections include "Myth, Literature and the African World," "The Open Sore of a Continent," and "The Burden of Memory and the Muse of Forgiveness."
Among the recognition 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 is currently the president of the International Parliament of Writers.
Educated in Ibadan, Nigeria, and in Leeds, England, where he obtained an honors degree in literature, Soyinka has held fellowship and professorial positions in theater and comparative literature at the Universities of Ibadan, Lagos, and Ife in Nigeria, and the University of Legon in Ghana, the universities of Sheffield and Cambridge in England, as well as at Yale, Cornell, and Harvard. More recently he held the Robert W. Woodruff Professorship of the Arts at Emory University in Atlanta. He has received numerous honorary doctoral degrees from universities around the world.
Soyinka is believed to be the first ever Nobel Laureate to join a faculty in Nevada. He will serve in his capacity as Endowed Chair of Creative Writing in UNLV's newly formed Institute of Modern Letters.
