The Center for Fiction Lifetime of Excellence in Fiction Award honors a writer who, through their exceptional body of work, has significantly shaped our culture and perspective.

Wole Soyinka

Nigerian playwright, poet, novelist and political activist Wole Soyinka was the first sub-Saharan African to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, in 1986. He was born in 1934 in Abeokuta, near Ibadan, into a Yoruba family and studied at University College in Ibadan, Nigeria, and the University of Leeds, England. Soyinka, who writes in English, is the author of five memoirs, including Aké: the Years of Childhood (1981) and You Must Set Forth at Dawn: A Memoir (2006), the novels The Interpreters (1965) and Season of Anomy (1973)—and most recently, his highly acclaimed tour de force Chronicles from the Land of the Happiest People on Earth—and nineteen plays informed by a diverse range of global influences, from Western avant-garde traditions to African politics and myth. His collections of poetry include Idanre and Other Poems (1967), Poems from Prison (1969, republished as A Shuttle in the Crypt in 1972), Ogun Abibiman (1976), Mandela’s Earth and Other Poems (1988), and Selected Poems (2001).

An outspoken opponent of oppression and tyranny worldwide and a critic of the political corruption in Nigeria and throughout Africa, Soyinka has lived in exile on several occasions. During the Nigerian civil war in the 1960s, he was held as a prisoner in solitary confinement after being charged with conspiring with the Biafrans. In 1997, while in exile, he was tried for, convicted of, and sentenced to death for antimilitary activities, a sentence that was later lifted.

Soyinka has taught at a number of universities worldwide, among them Ife, Cambridge, Yale, and Emory.

Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

Appearing in Conversation with Wole Soyinka

Henry Louis Gates, Jr. is the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and Director of the Hutchins Center for African & African American Research at Harvard University. An Emmy and Peabody Award-winning filmmaker, scholar, journalist, cultural critic, and institution builder, Gates has authored or co-authored more than 20 books and created more than 20 documentary films, including The African Americans: Many Rivers to Cross, Black in Latin America, Black America Since MLK: And Still I Rise, Africa’s Great Civilizations, Reconstruction: America After the Civil War, The Black Church: This Is Our Story, This is Our Song, and the genealogy series, Finding Your Roots. The recipient of 58 honorary degrees and numerous prizes, Gates was a member of the first class awarded “genius grants” by the MacArthur Foundation in 1981, and in 1998, he became the first African American scholar to be awarded the National Humanities Medal. In 2011, his portrait, by Yuqi Wang, was hung in the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C.A former chair of the Pulitzer Prize board, he is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and serves on a wide array of boards, including the New York Public Library, the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, the Aspen Institute, Jazz at Lincoln Center, the Whitney Museum of American Art, Library of America, and the Brookings Institution.