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Wole Soyinka

Playwright, poet and novelist; Nobel laureate in Literature, 1986

Nigeria · b. 1934

Wole Soyinka is a Nigerian playwright, poet and essayist and the first African writer to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature, awarded in 1986. He was imprisoned for twenty-two months, much of it in solitary confinement, during the Nigerian civil war.

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Question What are you unwilling to optimise?

That’s a very good question. I think I’m a very lazy writer and by that I mean that I do not battle, I don’t struggle too hard against it. If I have difficulties in the writing, I just go and do other things. I don’t feel a compulsion to write. Of course, when I start writing then it becomes a compulsive activity, because I’ve begun something and I want to continue, want to finish it. … I know there are other writers who sit down religiously every morning, they take their espresso, they put a clean sheet of paper there and they sit looking at that paper until they’ve finished or covered at least a number of those pages. No, I’m not like that. I have to be ready. It has to gestate it for quite a while and then it’s ready to burst forth.

Recorded Simon Stanford, NobelPrize.org (Nobel Prize Outreach), 28 April 2005 source ↗

Question What is something everyone in your world agrees about that you think is wrong?

Yes, I do. I do, but I were part company with certain schools of writers that I do not believe that it is necessarily the duty of the writer. I don’t believe that. If a writer is true to his vocation, to his or her vocation, the very process of creativity enlarges these human horizons. It provides insights, even when you’re not writing, when your writing’s not dealing with a concrete political situation.

Recorded Simon Stanford, NobelPrize.org (Nobel Prize Outreach), 28 April 2005 source ↗

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