Soyinka is Africa's most distinguished playwright, winning the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1986. A member of the Oru Yoruba tribe, he studied at the University College of Ibadan, then at Leeds University in England, where he earned his doctorate. During the six years spent in England, he was a dramaturgist at the Royal Court Theatre in London, 1958-59. In 1960, he was awarded a Rockefeller bursary and returned to Nigeria to study African drama. At the same time, he taught drama, and literature at various universities in Ibadan, Lagos and Ife, where, since 1975, he has been professor of comparative literature. In 1960 he founded the theatre group, "The 1960 Masks" and in 1964, the Orisun Theatre Company, in which he has produced his own plays and taken part as an actor. He has periodically been visiting professor at the universities of Cambridge, Sheffield and Yale.
During the civil war in Nigeria, Soyinka appealed in an article for cease-fire. For this he was arrested in 1967, accused of conspiring with the Biafra rebels and was held as a political prisoner for 22 months until 1969. This experience is recounted in his book, A Man Died. Soyinka has published about 20 works: drama, novels and poetry. His political stands have earned him exile from his homeland.
Soyinka's latest dramatic works are A Play of Giants (1984) and Requiem for a Futurologist (1985). Soyinka has written two novels, The Interpreters (1965) and Season of Anomy (1973), the autobiographical, The Man Died: Prison Notes (1972), and an account of his childhood, Ake (1981). Literary essays are collected in, among others, Myth, Literature and the African World (1975). His poems are collected in Idanre, and Other Poems (1967), Poems from Prison (1969), A Shuttle in the Crypt (1972) and in the long poem, Ogun Abibiman (1976).
