Akinwande Oluwole Soyinka, the Nigerian playwright, poet, novelist, and critic, received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1986. He writes of modern West Africa in a satirical style and with a tragic sense of the obstacles to human progress.

A member of the Yoruba people, Wole attended Government College and University College in Ibadan before graduating in English in 1958 from the University of Leeds, in England. Upon his return to Nigeria, Wole founded a national theatre, The Masks (later the Orisun Theatre), and wrote his first important play, A Dance of the Forests, for the Nigerian independence celebrations. The play satirizes the fledgling nation by stripping it of romantic legend and by showing that the present is no more a golden age than was the past.

In this and other dramas, Wole fuses Western elements with subject matter and dramatic techniques deeply rooted in Yoruba folklore and religion. He uses symbolism, flashback, and ingenious plotting to create a rich dramatic structure. Wole’s works exhibit humor and fine poetic style as well as his gift for irony and satire and for accurately matching the language of complex characters to their social position and moral qualities.

Wole's novels are The Interpreters (1965) and Season of Anomy, which appeared in 1973. His volumes of poetry include Idanre and Other Poems (1967), Poems from Prison (1969; republished as A Shuttle in the Crypt, 1972), and Mandela's Earth and Other Poems (1988). He wrote a good deal of Poems from Prison while a political prisoner in 1967-69. The Man Died (1972) is his prose account of his arrest and imprisonment. Wole's principal critical work is Myth, Literature, and the African World (1976), a collection of essays in which he examines the role of the artist in the light of Yoruba mythology and symbolism.

Wole was the first black African to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. His autobiography, Ake: The Years of Childhood, was published in 1981 and a companion piece, Isara: A Voyage Around Essay, in 1989.

Wole is Director of Literary Arts for the International Institute of Modern Letters, and he holds an untitled chair in creative writing in the English Department at UNLV.