Wole Soyinka - playwright, novelist, poet and polemical essayist - was born in Nigeria in 1934. Educated there and at Leeds University, he worked in the British theatre before returning to West Africa in 1960. In 1986 he became the first African writer to win the Nobel Prize for Literature. His plays include The Jero Plays (1960, 1966), The Road (1965), The Lion and the Jewel (1966), Madmen and Specialists (1971), Death and the King's Horseman (1975), A Play with Giants (1984), A Scourge of Hyacinths (1991) and From Zia, With Love (1992). His novels include The Interpreters (1973) and Season of Anomy (1980). His collections of poetry include Idanre (1967), A Shuttle in the Crypt (1972) - composed during a period of over two years in prison without trial, most of it in solitary confinement - and Mandela's Earth (1990). In 1988, his collection of essays on literature and culture, Art, Dialogue and Outrage was published. He has also written three autobiographical volumes Aké: The Years of Childhood (1981), Ìsarà: A Voyage Around Essay (1989) and Ibadan (1994).

Since 2007 he has been Professor in Residence at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, California.