Soyinka wins Lifetime Achievement Award

Wole Soyinka

Professor Wole Soyinka, the 1986 Nobel Laureate in Literature, during the week,  won the Lifetime Achievement Award of the annual Anisfield-Wolf Book Award in America alongside three other people

This year’s event marked the  78th edition of the award organised by The Root and sponsored by the Cleveland Foundation.

Other writers that won awards alongside Soyinka were: Andrew Solomon for Far From The Tree (Non-Fiction), Eugene Gloria for My Favorite Warlord (Poetry), Kevin Powers for The Yellow Birds (Fiction) and Laird Hunt for Kind One (Fiction).

Past winners include Derek Walcott, Toni Morrison, Nadine Gordimer and Wole Soyinka before they won the Nobel Prize.

Annually, since 1935, the Anisfield-Wolf Awards have been honouring books and authors that had made important contributions to our understanding of racism and our appreciation of the rich diversity of human culture.

The book prizes were established by Edith Anisfield Wolf to reflect her family’s passion for issues of social justice in honour of John Anisfield and  Eugene Wolf, both father and husband to the Cleveland poet and philanthropist.

We have lost a brother - Wole Soyinka and J.P Clark

For us, the loss of Chinua Achebe is, above all else, intensely personal. We have lost a brother, a colleague, a trailblazer and a doughty fighter. Of the "pioneer quartet" of contemporary Nigerian literature, two voices have been silenced – one, of the poet Christopher Okigbo, and now, the novelist Chinua Achebe. It is perhaps difficult for outsiders of that intimate circle to appreciate this sense of depletion, but we take consolation in the young generation of writers to whom the baton has been passed, those who have already creatively ensured that there is no break in the continuum of the literary vocation.We need to stress this at a critical time of Nigerian history, where the forces of darkness appear to overshadow the illumination of existence that literature represents. These are forces that arrogantly pride themselves implacable and brutal enemies of what Chinua and his pen represented, not merely for the African continent, but for humanity. Indeed, we cannot help wondering if the recent insensate massacre of Chinua's people in Kano, only a few days ago, hastened the fatal undermining of that resilient will that had sustained him so many years after his crippling accident.No matter the reality, after the initial shock, and a sense of abandonment, we confidently assert that Chinua lives. His works provide their enduring testimony to the domination of the human spirit over the forces of repression, bigotry and retrogression