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Congratulations! - Wole Soyinka wins Anisfield-Wolf Lifetime Achievement Award

Submitted by admin on 29 April 2013

Nigerian writers continue to make headlines: it was announced last week that the 1986 Nobel Laureate in Literature Professor Wole Soyinka is the recipient of the 78th Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards Lifetime Achievement Award sponsored by the Cleveland Foundation.
The Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards, established in 1935 by Cleveland poet and philanthropist Edith Anisfield Wolf, are dedicated to honouring written works that make important contributions to the understanding of racism and the appreciation of the rich diversity of human culture. The awards, which were originally administered by the Saturday Review, have been administered by the Cleveland Foundation since 1963.

According to Henry Louis Gates, Jr., the director of the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African-American Research at Harvard University, who chairs the jury, “The 2013 Anisfield-Wolf winners are exemplars who broaden our vision of race and diversity.”
Soyinka first won an Anisfield-Wolf award in 1983 for his memoir Ake: The Years of Childhood . Three years later, he went on to become the first African to win a Nobel Prize for Literature.
Soyinka, along with other Anisfield-Wolf 2013 winners 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), will be honoured in Cleveland on September 12, 2013 at a ceremony at the Ohio Theatre.
Click here to see ZODML's collection of Wole Soyinka's works.
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