Tunde Folawiyo | Wole Soyinka - Nigeria's greatest author

Wole Soyinka is an acclaimed writer, best known for his poetry and plays. He was the first person from Africa to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature - an honour bestowed upon him in 1986. Over the course of his career, he has published approximately 20 works, including books of poetry, two novels and several plays.

Like Tunde Folawiyo, Soyinka's homeland is Nigeria. Born in 1934, he grew up in the city of Abeokuta, and completed his preparatory studies for university in Ibadan, at Government College. Following this, he moved to the UK, to study drama at the University of Leeds. Graduating in 1957, he remained in England, working as a director, actor and script reader at London's Royal Court Theatre; during this period of his life, he also composed a number of plays, including The Lion & the Jewel, and The Swamp Dwellers, both of which were successfully staged in Ibadan and London.

After receiving a Rockefeller Research Fellowship in 1960, Soyinka decided to return to Nigeria, to complete his work on Africa theatre at the University College of Ibadan. Here, he produced what would become one of his most famous works, A Dance of the Forest; this was a scathing critique of the political elites in Nigeria. It was very well received, and ended up being selected as the official play used to celebrate Nigerian Independence Day.

For the next seven years, Soyinka worked in a number of universities in Lagos and Ife, and produced several plays, including politically-focused dramas such as Kongi's Harvest and The Road, as well as comedies, the most notable of which was The Trials of Brother Jero. He also wrote for television and radio programmes, arranged guerrilla theatre performances, and created satirical revues.

In 1965, his debut novel The Interpreters was published; this fascinating, complex work is one which most people, including Tunde Folawiyo, have probably heard of. The book centres around six intellectuals from Nigeria, who share and discuss their experiences of Africa.

Over the years, Soyinka continued to compose plays, essays and poems, resulting in him winning the Nobel Prize for Literature in the mid-eighties. He has since written a number of new works, including Outsiders, a book of poetry, and King Baabu, a play about dictatorship in Africa. Eight years ago, he published his memoirs, which he named 'You must set forth at dawn'.