Nobel Prize-winning playwright Wole Soyinka will speak at UNLV on Oct. 26 as part of the Barrick Lecture Series.
Soyinka's presentation, "Human Rights and the Claims of Relativism," is set for 7:30 p.m. in Artemus W. Ham Concert Hall. The event is free, but tickets are required. Tickets may be picked up beginning Oct. 16 at the Performing Arts Center box office at Ham Concert Hall. For additional information on tickets, call 895-2787.
Soyinka, a playwright, poet, novelist, essayist, and theater director, won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1986.
Some of Soyinka's writing stems from his imprisonment in his native Nigeria from 1967 to 1969 during that nation's civil war. Most of his time in prison was spent in solitary confinement. From this experience emerged his work, The Man Died.
Soyinka, who currently is a professor of the arts at Emory University in Atlanta, writes mainly in English, but his works are distinguished by their exploration of "the African world view" and are steeped in Yoruba mythology, imagery, and dramatic idioms. Ake, his childhood biography, and his tragic drama Death and the King's Horseman, have been acclaimed as classics.
Other plays include The Strong Breed, The Lion and the Jewel, A Dance of the Forests, The Road, A Play of Giants, and Beatification of Area Boy. His adaptation of Euripedes' The Bacchae, was performed by Britain's National Theatre. Other adaptations include Brecht's Threepenny Opera, retitled Opera Wonyosi.
His collected poems have been published under several titles, including Idanre and Other Poems, A Shuttle in the Crypt, and Mandela's Earth and Other Poems. His essay collections include Myth, Literature and the African World, The Open Sore of a Continent, and The Burden of Memory and the Muse of Forgiveness.
Among the recognitions he has received for his artistic endeavors are the Enrico Mattei Award for the Humanities, the Leopold Sedar Senghor Award for the Arts, the Benson Medal of the Royal Society for Literature, the Premio Grinzane Cavour, Italy's Premio Litterario Internazionalle Mondello, and the UNESCO Medal for the Arts.
Soyinka, 65, is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature of the United Kingdom, Academie Universelle des Cultures in France, the Academy of Arts and Letters in Germany, The American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Pan-African Writers Association, the Association of Nigerian Authors, and the International Parliament of Writers.
Educated in Ibadan, Nigeria, and in Leeds, England, where he obtained an honours degree in literature, Soyinka has held fellowship and professorial positions in theater and comparative literature at the Universities of Ibadan, Lagos, and Ife in Nigeria, and the Un versity of Legon in Ghana, the universities of Sheffield and Cambridge in England, as well as at Yale, Cornell, and Harvard. He has received numerous honorary doctoral degrees from universities around the world.
The Barrick Lecture Series, funded through a grant from philanthropist Marjorie Ban presents nationally and internationally known speakers from a variety of fields each year at UNLV. The presentations are free and open to the public.
For additional information, call 895-2787.
