Early life and education
Akinwande Oluwole "Wole" Soyinka was born on 13 July 1934 in Abeokuta, in what is now Ogun State, to Samuel Ayodele Soyinka, an Anglican clergyman and school headmaster, and Grace Eniola Soyinka, a shopkeeper and political activist S1S3. He attended Abeokuta Grammar School and Government College, Ibadan, before studying at University College Ibadan and then, from 1954, at the University of Leeds in England, where he read English literature and drama under the critic G. Wilson Knight S3. He worked briefly as a play-reader and dramaturgist at London's Royal Court Theatre before returning to Nigeria in 1960 on a Rockefeller research fellowship to study African drama, founding a theatre company, the 1960 Masks, that same year S1
Imprisonment during the Nigerian Civil War
After Nigeria's Eastern Region declared itself the Republic of Biafra in the nigerian civil war of 1967, Soyinka attempted to mediate between the federal government and Biafran leaders and publicly appealed for a ceasefire; the federal military government under General Yakubu Gowon accused him of conspiring with Biafra and detained him without trial S1S3. He was held for close to two years, from August 1967 to October 1969, for much of it in solitary confinement in a Kaduna prison cell, before his release S1S3. He later documented the experience in the prison memoir The Man Died: Prison Notes, published in 1972, which a Nigerian court banned in 1984 S3
Major plays and international recognition
Soyinka had already established himself as a dramatist before his imprisonment, with The Lion and the Jewel (1959) and A Dance of the Forests, commissioned for Nigeria's independence celebrations and performed in 1960, among his best-known early works, alongside The Road (1965) and Kongi's Harvest, performed in 1965 and published in 1967 S3. His best-known later play, Death and the King's Horseman, based on an actual 1946 incident in colonial Oyo, was written in 1975 and first staged in 1976 S3. In 1986 the Swedish Academy awarded him the Nobel Prize in Literature "in a wide cultural perspective and with poetic overtones" for fashioning "the drama of existence," making him the first Black African, and to date Nigeria's only nigerian nobel laureates, in any category S1S3. In his Nobel lecture that December he devoted his remarks to Nelson Mandela and the campaign against apartheid S1
Exile under Abacha and return to Nigeria
Following the annulment of Nigeria's june 12 1993 presidential election and the subsequent seizure of power by General Sani Abacha, Soyinka became one of the military government's most prominent public critics and an associate of the pro-democracy coalition NADECO; he left Nigeria in November 1994, reportedly crossing overland into Benin before continuing abroad S3. In March 1997 the Abacha government charged him and fifteen others with treason in absentia — a charge Human Rights Watch's own contemporary reporting recorded as arising from a Lagos radio announcement that "Soyinka, 15 others charged with treason" — and he was subsequently sentenced to death while still outside the country S2S3. He remained in exile until Abacha's death in June 1998, returning to Nigeria that October under armed police escort S3
Later activism and continued public life
Soyinka has continued to comment publicly on Nigerian and international politics well into his ninth decade, including monitoring the conduct of Nigeria's 2015 general election S1. In October 2016, ahead of that year's US presidential election, he stated he would destroy his US green card if Donald Trump won; after Trump's victory, Reuters reported in December 2016 that Soyinka had "torn up his United States green card and renounced his American residency in protest" S5. Soyinka's US relationship with the Trump administration resurfaced in October 2025, when The Guardian reported that his US visa had been revoked, describing him as "the acclaimed Nigerian Nobel prize-winning writer who has been critical of Trump since his first presidency" S4