contributors' biographies

Wole Soyinka

Locked in solitary confinement, Nigerian Wole Soyinka once wrote his poetry on scraps of cigarette wrappers. "One must stay with one's vision and consider the rest as the aberration," he said.

A poet, playwright, and novelist, Wole is also one of his country's most prominent dissidents. Despite being censored, banned, and imprisoned by successive military regimes, he became the first African to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1986. His transcendent vision has been said to turn defeat into hope and fragmentation into unity.

In exile from Nigeria since 1994, Wole is now teaching, lecturing "and still politicing" as Woodruff Professor of Arts at Emory University in the United States.

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