Wole Soyinka, first African winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature (1986), is the greatest African playwright, a novelist of global fame and poet and author of key essays on African culture and myths. Yoruba was born in 1934 in Nigeria. He was jailed during the Nigerian civil war (1967-69) and later wrote about his experience in isolation in The Man Died (1971). Sentenced to death and persecuted by dictator Sani Abacha, he lived in exile in the USA until 1998. His work is published in Italian by Jaca Book: Theatre, 1 (1979); Theatre, 2 (1980); Death and the King’s Horseman (1993); Myth, Literature and the African world view (1995); Isara. A Voyage around Essay (1996); Aké: The Years of Childhood (2012); several of his novels were recently republished in Italian: The Man Died, The Interpreters, Season of Anomy as was the play The Road (2018) and the unpublished work L’uomo è morto? Smurare la libertà (May 2018).