Noble Prize Winning Writer to Speak at University of Missouri - Columbia

Here is a flyer from the University of Missouri-Columbia's Center for the Literary Arts.

MU’s Center for the Literary Arts
proudly presents the
Nobel Prize Laureate
Wole Soyinka

Recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature, Wole Soyinka has been called Africa’s finest writer. Primarily a playwright, he is also an essayist, novelist, poet, and theater director. He writes mainly in English, but his works are distinguished by their exploration of "the African world view, often steeped in Yoruba mythology, imagery and dramatic idioms."

Author of more than 35 books, Soyinka’s passion for the written word is most poignantly revealed by his actions while imprisoned during the Nigerian Civil War; denied reading and writing materials, he manufactured his own ink, and kept a diary written on toilet paper, cigarette packages and between the lines of the few books he secretly obtained. Every poem or fragment he managed to smuggle to the outside world became a literary event.

In addition to the Nobel Prize, his many honors include the Enrico Mattei Award for the Humanities, the Leopold Sedar Senghor Award for the Arts, the John Whiting Literary Prize, the Benson Medal of the Royal Society for Literature, and the UNESCO Medal for the Arts.

Professor Soyinka has held positions at the Universities of Ibadan, Logos and Ife (Nigeria), Legon (Ghana), Sheffield and Cambridge (England), Yale, Cornell, Harvard and Emory (USA), among others. He is currently Professor Emeritus of Obafemi Awolowo University in Ile-Ife, Nigeria, Fellow of the DuBois Institute at Harvard University, and Senior Fellow of the Black Mountain Institute at the University of Nevada.

He joins us at MU as the John William Proctor Distinguished Author for 2007-08.

Monday, September 24, 2007, 7:30 p.m.
Jesse Hall Auditorium
cla@missouri.edu free and open to the public (doors open at 6:45 p.m.) 884-7775