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Tag Archives: Wole Soyinka

Meet Wole Soyinka, 2013 Lifetime Achievement Winner

We’ll be spending this week exploring the lives and works of the 2013 Anisfield-Wolf Award winners. Today we're recognizing Wole Soyinka, this year's Lifetime Achievement winner. The greatest threat to freedom is the absence of criticism. ~Wole Soyinka  A playwright/poet/essayist, Soyinka is one of Nigeria's most beloved figures. Repeatedly, he has risked his life to protest the corrupt governmental regimes. In 1967, he was arrested and put in solitary confinement for 22 months for his attempts at brokering a peace between the warring Nigerian and Biafran parties warmongering in his homeland. He kept writing during this time, creating ink in his cell and using scraps of paper to collect his poetry.  Wole Soyinka's Ake: The Years of Childhood won an Anisfield-Wolf Book Award... Read More →

Meet Our 2013 Winners!

The jury has spoken and five new authors will join the Anisfield-Wolf family. Our 2013 winners are:  Laird Hunt, Kind One, Fiction Kevin Powers, The Yellow Birds, Fiction Eugene Gloria, My Favorite Warlord, Poetry Andrew Solomon, Far From the Tree, Nonfiction Wole Soyinka, Lifetime Achievement “The 2013 Anisfield-Wolf winners are exemplars who broaden our vision of race and diversity,” said Henry Louis Gates, Jr., who chairs the jury. “This year, there is exceptional writing about the war in Iraq, slavery on a Kentucky pig farm, the Filipino experience in the U.S., and the complexity of families in which a child is radically different from parents.” Gates directs the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African-American Research at Harvard University, where... Read More →

Meet Our 2012 Winners!

“The 2012 Anisfield-Wolf winners reflect the complexity of the issues of race and cultural diversity in our world,” said Henry Louis Gates Jr., the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and director of the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African-American Research at Harvard University, who serves as jury chair. “These books and the people who created them help us gain a deeper understanding of the need to respect both the humanity and individuality of one other.” Our 2012 winners are (click on any of the photos to read more on the authors): Esi Edugyan, Half-Blood Blues: A Novel, Fiction David Blight, American Oracle: The Civil War in the Civil Rights Era, Nonfiction David Livingstone Smith, Less Than Human: Why We Demean, Enslave, and Exterminate Others... Read More →

Chairing the Jury

Chairing the jury for the Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards is one of the single pleasures of my life. The thought that a poet – a white, female poet – had the foresight to endow a prize to honor excellence and diversity, at the height of the Great Depression, is something of a miracle, isn't it? And in a few days, we will honor her commitment to racial equality and justice by recognizing this year's winners of her prize, the 76th such occasion. It is humbling to thumb through the names of previous winners, including Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston to the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, and three Nobel laureates, Wole Soyinka, Toni Morrison, and Derek Walcott. God bless Edith Anisfield Wolf, and the Cleveland Foundation for so judiciously protecting her legacy. Read More →
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