Prof. Wole Soyinka
Although Muyiwa seems not to recall if Wole won any prizes for his creative pieces, Biodun Jeyifo records that he won ‘prizes’ for his poems.” Wole himself admits that he was “writing as a school boy and winning a few prizes at Arts Festivals…” because he cultivated the habit of writing pieces and sending them in for evaluation at such platforms as the Ministry of Education or magazines. But textual evidence of these important early attempts at literary limelight has proved absolutely difficult to come by, and literary historians have described this situation as representing a big gap, not only in Soyinka studies, but in African literature as a whole. Bernth Lindfors, perhaps the most prolific and resourceful of the archivists and historians working on…
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