Wole Soyinka

Soyinka, Wole 

Born July 13, 1934, in Abeokuta. Nigerian writer and playwright.

In the satiric plays The Lion and the Jewel (1963) and A Dance of the Forests (1963), Soyinka employed the grotesque to show the clash between the traditional and the modern in Africa, urging his people to reflect seriously on their past. He is the author of the picaresque comedy The Trials of Brother Jew (1964), the antiwar parable Madmen and Specialists (1971), and the novel The Interpreters (1965; Russian translation, 1970), in which he exposed corruption in the bureaucracy of Nigeria and criticized extreme forms of African nationalism. Soyinka’s poems are pervaded with themes of disenchantment with the reality of modernday Nigeria.

WORKS

Five Plays. London-Ibadan, 1964.
The Road. London-Ibadan, 1965.
Idanre and Other Poems. London [1967].
The Man Died, Prison Notes. New York, 1972.
In Russian translation:
[Stikhi.] In Golosa afrikanskikh poetov. Moscow, 1968.

REFERENCES

Sovremennye literatury Afriki: Sev. i Zap. Afrika. Moscow, 1973. (See index.)
Sovremennye literatury Afriki: Vost. i luzh. Afrika. Moscow, 1974. (See index.)
Moore, G. Wole Soyinka. [London, 1971.]
Ricard, A. Théàtre et nationalisme: Wole Soyinka et Leroi Jones. Paris [1972].
Jones, E. D. The Writing of Wole Soyinka. London, 1975.

S. P. KARTUZOV