Wole Soyinka’s Net Worth And Biography

Wole Soyinka is one of the greatest playwrights from Africa with a net worth of $2 million, according to multiple sources. He is the First African to Win the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1986 and devoted his Nobel Prize to the independence of South Africa.

Soyinka called for a cease-fire in an article during the Nigerian civil war. Due to this, he was detained in 1967 on suspicion of plotting with the Biafra separatists and incarcerated as a political prisoner for 22 months, from 1967 to 1969.

There are roughly 20 works by Soyinka, including plays, books, and poetry. He uses an expansive and verbally complex literary style when writing in English. Without doubts, Wole Soyinka is an integral part of African Literature. That said, let’s discuss Wole Soyinka’s net worth and biography in this article.

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Wole Soyinka’s Net Worth And Biography

The table below contains Wole Soyinka’s net worth and short biodata

Early Life

Wole Soyinka was born on July 13, 1934, in Abeokuta, a city in western Nigeria close to Ibadan. Following his pre-university studies at Government College in Ibadan in 1954, he pursued his studies at the University of Leeds, where he later earned his Ph.D. in 1973.

More so,  He worked as a dramaturg at the Royal Court Theatre in London from 1958 to 1959 during his six years in England. After receiving a Rockefeller scholarship in 1960, he went back to Nigeria to study African play.

He also taught literature and drama at several institutions in Ibadan, Lagos, and Ife, where he has been as a professor of comparative literature since 1975. He founded the theater companies “The 1960 Masks” in 1960 and “Orisun Theatre Company” in 1964.

Wole Soyinka has also produced his own plays and performed in both groups’ productions. He has occasionally served as a visiting professor at Yale, Cambridge, and Sheffield universities.

His mother was a small trader and a political activist, while his father was a senior teacher at the St. Peters School in Abeokuta. Wole Soyinka spent his formative years in his hometown, where he attended St. Peter’s Primary School and earned his primary education. He was admitted into the Abeokuta Grammar School, Idi-Aba, where he completed his secondary school, after passing his entrance exam.

Career

As a playwright, Soyinka has drawn inspiration from a variety of authors, including the Irish writer J.M. Synge, but his work is most closely associated with the traditional popular African theater, which combines dance, song, and action.

His works are mostly centered on the center of the Yoruba mythology on which he bases his writing. His early plays, The Swamp Dwellers and The Lion and the Jewel (a light comedy), which were produced in Ibadan in 1958 and 1959 and were published in 1963, were written when he was living in London. Later satirical comedies include Jero’s Metamorphosis and The Trial of Brother Jero, which debuted in 1963 after being played in 1960.

Six Nigerian intellectuals discuss and interpret their experiences in Africa in Soyinka’s two novels, The Interpreters (1965), which is a narratively complex work compared to Joyce’s and Faulkner’s, and Season of Anomy (1973), which is based on the author’s thoughts while he was imprisoned and contrasts the Orpheus and Euridice myth with Yoruba mythology.

The Man Died: Prison Notes (1972) and Aké (1981), a memoir of his early years, are entirely autobiographical and prominently feature his parents’ tenderness and involvement in their son. Collections of literary essays include Myth, Literature, and the African World (1975).

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What Is Soyinka’s Net Worth

Wole Soyinka’s net worth is estimated to be around $2 million according to multiple sources. He doesn’t live a luxurious lifestyle as he always appears in a simple shirt and trousers in most media appearances. The appearance of an intellectual

One of the best-selling authors, Wole Soyinka is well-known and has published a number of books on Amazon and other online book retailers. His early professional life began in 1958, shortly after receiving his Master’s degree.

He returned to Nigeria and took up many jobs at various organizations, including that of English instructor and researcher at the Obafemi Awolowo University in Ile-Ife and researcher in the English language at the University of Ibadan.

The table below contains Wole Soyinka’s net worth and short biodata

Famous Quotes Of Wole Soyinka

Here are famous quotes of Wole Soyinka according to BrainyQoutes:

• The greatest threat to freedom is the absence of criticism.

• A tiger does not shout its tigritude, it acts.

• You cannot live a normal existence if you haven’t taken care of a problem that affects your life and affects the lives of others, values that you hold which in fact define your very existence.

• Books and all forms of writing are a terror to those who wish to suppress the truth.

• My horizon on humanity is enlarged by reading the writers of poems, seeing a painting, listening to some music, some opera, which has nothing at all to do with a volatile human condition or struggle or whatever. It enriches me as a human being.

• Human life has meaning only to that degree and as long as it is lived in the service of humanity.

• I don’t know any other way to live but to wake up every day armed with my convictions, not yielding them to the threat of danger and to the power and force of people who might despise me.

• But the ultimate lesson is just to sit down and write. That’s all.

• Trading and religion have always been aligned together in the history of the world, especially on the African continent.

• One has to confront history honestly.

• My understanding of the creative process is simply that all cultures and all concerns meet at a certain point, the human point in which everything is related to one another. That has been my creative experience. I never know who’s influencing me at any time.

Famous Works Of Wole Soyinka

Plays

• 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)

Poetry

• Telephone Conversation (1963)
• Idanre and other poems (1967)
• A Big Airplane Crashed Into The Earth
• 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)

Novels

• The Interpreters (1965)
• Season of Anomy (1972)
• Chronicles from the Land of the Happiest People on Earth

Short stories

• A Tale of Two (1958)
• Egbe’s Sworn Enemy (1960)

Wole Soyinka’s Net Worth And Biography

The table below contains Wole Soyinka’s net worth and short biodata