Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka will hold a public reading of his latest work at 7:30 p.m. April 16 at the Marjorie Barrick Museum Auditorium at UNLV.
Soyinka, who holds the Elias Ghanem chair in creative writing at UNLV, will read from his "Samarkand and Other Markets I Have Known," a long poem recently published by Rainmaker Editions. The poem celebrates the cultural crossroads of a market in Uzbekistan while denouncing fanaticism and commenting on world affairs.
Rainmaker Editions is a series of fine-press books published by the International Institute of Modern Letters, which is headquartered at UNLV. The institute and UNLV are co-sponsoring the event.
A playwright, poet, novelist, essayist, and theater director, Soyinka won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1986.
Soyinka 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. His most recent play, an adaptation of Sophocles' "Oedipus at Colonus" was presented last year in Delphi, Greece by the Nevada Conservatory Theatre, a professional company housed in UNLV's Judy Bayley Theatre.
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," a book he composed on discarded cigarette packages, toilet paper, and between the lines of books he secretly acquired.
