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Wole SoyinkaWole Soyinka is a playwright, poet, author, teacher, and political activist, as well as the winner of the 1986 Nobel Prize in Literature. Soyinka was born on July 13, 1934, at Abeokuta, near Ibadan, in western Nigeria. After preparatory university studies in 1954 at Government College Ibadan, he continued his education at the University of Leeds, where he received his doctorate in 1973. He has periodically served as a visiting professor at the Universities of Cambridge and Sheffield, and Yale University. Most recently he has served as President’s Professor in Residence at Loyola Marymount University. He is the author of numerous plays, poems, and books, including: The Interpreters (1965), Season of Anomy (1973), The Man Died: Prison Notes (1972), and Myth, Literature and the African World (1975). |
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Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'oNgũgĩ wa Thiong’o is a novelist and theorist of postcolonial literature and is currently a Distinguished Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Irvine. He was born in Kenya in 1938 and was educated at Kamandura, Manguu, and Kinyogori primary schools, and Alliance High School, all in Kenya; Makerere University College (then affiliated with University College London); and the University of Leeds. A literary giant, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s bibliography boasts over thirty publications over a half century, and he holds numerous honors from distinguished institutions on three continents, including honorary doctorates from Yale, the University of Dar es Salaam, and the University of Leeds. He is the author of numerous books, which have been translated into thirty languages, plays, and scholarly articles. Some of his more notable works include the play The Black Hermit (1963), and the novels Devil on the Cross (Caitaani mũtharaba-Inĩ) (1982) and Wizard of the Crow (2006). |
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Yash Tandon, Ph.DYash Tandon is a Ugandan policymaker, political activist, professor, author, and public intellectual. He has lectured extensively in the areas of international relations and political economy. In 1997 he founded SEATINI, the Southern and Eastern Africa Trade Information and Negotiations Institute, of which he is still the chairman. It is an NGO that seeks to build African capacity to negotiate in key global processes, including trade, investment, and intellectual property issues. He is the author of numerous books and is an honorary professor at the University of Warwick and Middlesex University. He has authored numerous notable works, including: Trade is War (2015), Ending Aid Dependence (2008), In Defence of Democracy (1979), and Problems of a Displaced Minority (1973). |