Soyinka (Prof.) Oluwole Akinwande Babatunde

Keffi’s Birthday Treat (1954)
The Invention (1957)
The Swamp Dwellers (1958)
A Quality of Violence (1959)
The Lion and the Jewel (1959)
The Trials of Brother Jero (1960)
A Dance of the Forests (1960)
My Father’s Burden (1960)
The Strong Breed (1964)
Before the Blackout (1964)
Kongi’s Harvest (1964)
The Road (1965)
Madmen and Specialists (1970)
The Bacchae of Euripides (1973)
Camwood on the Leaves (1973)
Jero’s Metamorphosis (1973)
Death and the King’s Horseman (1975)
Opera Wonyosi (1977)
Requiem for a Futurologist (1983)
A Play of Giants (1984)
Childe Internationale (1987)
From Zia with Love (1992)
The Detainee (radio play)
A Scourge of Hyacinths (radio play)
The Beatification of Area Boy (1996)
Document of Identity (radio play, 1999)
King Baabu (2001)
Etiki Revu Wetin
Alapata Apata (2011)
“Thus Spake Orunmila” (in Sixty-Six Books (2011)

Novels :

The Interpreters (1965)
Season of Anomy (1973)
Chronicles from the Land of the Happiest People on Earth (Bookcraft, Nigeria; Bloomsbury, UK; Pantheon, US, 2021)

Short stories:

A Tale of Two (1958)
Egbe’s Sworn Enemy (1960)
Madame Etienne’s Establishment (1960)

Memoirs :

The Man Died: Prison Notes (1972)
Aké: The Years of Childhood (1981)
Ibadan: The Penkelemes Years: a memoir 1945–1965 (1989)
Ìsarà: A Voyage around Essay (1989)
You Must Set Forth at Dawn (2006)

Poetry collections:

Telephone Conversation (1963) (appeared in Modern Poetry in Africa)
Idanre and other poems (1967)
A Big Airplane Crashed into The Earth (original title Poems from Prison) (1969)
A Shuttle in the Crypt (1971)
Ogun Abibiman (1976)
Mandela’s Earth and other poems (1988)
Early Poems (1997)
Samarkand and Other Markets I Have Known (2002)

Essays :

“Towards a True Theater” (1962)
Culture in Transition (1963)
Neo-Tarzanism: The Poetics of Pseudo-Transition
A Voice That Would Not Be Silenced
Art, Dialogue, and Outrage: Essays on Literature and Culture (1988)
From Drama and the African World View (1976)
Myth, Literature, and the African World (1976)
The Blackman and the Veil (1990)
The Credo of Being and Nothingness (1991)
The Burden of Memory – The Muse of Forgiveness (1999)
A Climate of Fear (the BBC Reith Lectures 2004, audio and transcripts)
New Imperialism (2009)
Of Africa (2012)
Beyond Aesthetics: Use, Abuse, and Dissonance in African Art Traditions (2019)

Films :

Kongi’s Harvest
Culture in Transition
Blues for a Prodigal

Translations :

The Forest of a Thousand Daemons: A Hunter’s Saga (1968; a translation of D. O. Fagunwa’s Ògbójú Ọdẹ nínú Igbó Irúnmalẹ̀)
In the Forest of Olodumare (2010; a translation of D. O. Fagunwa’s Igbo Olodumare)

The Wole Soyinka Annual Lecture Series was founded in 1994 and “is dedicated to honouring one of Nigeria and Africa’s most outstanding and enduring literary icons: Professor Wole Soyinka”. It is organised by the National Association of Seadogs (Pyrates Confraternity), which organisation Soyinka with six other students founded in 1952 at the then University College Ibadan.

In 2011, the African Heritage Research Library and Cultural Centre built a writers’ enclave in his honour. It is located in Adeyipo Village, Lagelu Local Government Area, Ibadan, Oyo State, Nigeria. The enclave includes a Writer-in-Residence Programme that enables writers to stay for a period of two, three or six months, engaging in serious creative writing. In 2013, he visited the Benin Moat as the representative of UNESCO in recognition of the Naija seven Wonders project. He is currently the consultant for the Lagos Black Heritage Festival, with the Lagos State deeming him as the only person who could bring out the aims and objectives of the Festival to the people. He was appointed a patron of Humanists UK in 2020.

In 2014, the collection Crucible of the Ages: Essays in Honour of Wole Soyinka at 80, edited by Ivor Agyeman-Duah and Ogochwuku Promise, was published by Bookcraft in Nigeria and Ayebia Clarke Publishing in the UK, with tributes and contributions from Nadine Gordimer, Toni Morrison, Ama Ata Aidoo, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Henry Louis Gates, Jr, Margaret Busby, Kwame Anthony Appiah, Ali Mazrui, Sefi Atta, and others.

In 2018, Henry Louis Gates, Jr tweeted that Nigerian filmmaker and writer Onyeka Nwelue visited him in Harvard and was making a documentary film on Wole Soyinka. As part of efforts to mark his 84th birthday, a collection of poems titled 84 Delicious Bottles of Wine was published for Wole Soyinka, edited by Onyeka Nwelue and Odega Shawa. Among the notable contributors was Adamu Usman Garko, award-winning teenage essayist, poet and writer.

1973: Honorary D.Litt., University of Leeds
1973–74: Overseas Fellow, Churchill College, Cambridge
1983: Elected an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature (Hon. FRSL)
1983: Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, United States
1986: Nobel Prize for Literature
1986: Agip Prize for Literature
1986: Commander of the Order of the Federal Republic (CFR), national honour of Nigeria
1990: Benson Medal from the Royal Society of Literature
1993: Honorary doctorate, Harvard University
2002: Honorary fellowship, SOAS University of London
2005: Honorary doctorate degree, Princeton University
2005: Enstooled as the Akinlatun of Egbaland, a Nigerian chief, by the Oba Alake of the Egba clan of Yorubaland. Soyinka became a tribal aristocrat by way of this, one vested with the right to use the Yoruba title Oloye as a pre-nominal honorific.
2009: Golden Plate Award of the American Academy of Achievement presented by Awards Council member Archbishop Desmond Tutu at an awards ceremony at St. George’s Cathedral, Cape Town, South Africa
2013: Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, Lifetime Achievement, United States
2014: International Humanist Award
2017: Joins the University of Johannesburg, South Africa, as a Distinguished Visiting Professor in the Faculty of Humanities
2017: “Special Prize” of the Europe Theatre Prize
2018: University of Ibadan’s arts theatre renamed as Wole Soyinka Theatre.
2018: Honorary Doctorate Degree of Letters, Federal University of Agriculture, Abeokuta (FUNAAB).
2022: Honorary Degree from Cambridge University, bestowed upon people who have made outstanding achievements in their respective fields.
Europe Theatre Prize
In 2017, he received the Special Prize of the Europe Theatre Prize, in Rome. The Prize organization stated:

A Special Prize is awarded to Wole Soyinka, writer, playwright and poet, Nobel Prize for literature in 1986, who with his work has been able to create an ideal bridge between Europe and Africa (…) With his art and his commitment, Wole Soyinka has contributed to a renewal of African cultural life, participating actively in the dialogue between Africa and Europe, touching on more and more urgent political themes and bringing, in English, richness and beauty to literature, theatre and action in Europe and the four corners of the world.

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. Soyinka has published about 20 works: drama, novels and poetry. He writes in English and his literary language is marked by great scope and richness of words.

As dramatist, Soyinka has been influenced by, among others, the Irish writer, J.M. Synge, but links up with the traditional popular African theatre with its combination of dance, music, and action. He bases his writing on the mythology of his own tribe-the Yoruba-with Ogun, the god of iron and war, at the centre.