Wole Soyinka in Conversation - Live Stream

Following engineer and Yoruba royal Duyole Pitan-Payne, Chronicles from the Land of the Happiest People on Earth is a dazzlingly brutal look at the nature of greed, power and the soul of a nation.

The novel is described by Publishers Weekly as ‘a biting satire . . . and an intriguing and droll whodunnit’.

Born into a Yoruba family in Abeokuta, Nigeria, Wole Soyinka published his debut novel in 1964.

During the same decade, he became an outspoken political activist and a critic of the Nigerian government, leading to the first of two sentences as a political prisoner.

Since then, Soyinka has remained an enduring critic of successive Nigerian governments, and the nature of corruption at large, even evading a death sentence in absentia.

In 1986, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Emma Dabiri is an Irish-Nigerian academic, activist and broadcaster. Her 2019 debut Don’t Touch My Hair was published to critical and commercial acclaim. Her latest book What White People Can Do Next: From Allyship to Coalition, published in April 2021, is a Sunday Times and Irish Times bestseller.

A regular broadcaster on the BBC, Dabiri recently hosted BBC Radio 4’s critically-acclaimed documentary Journeys in Afrofuturism, as well as presenting and co-producing Hair Power: Me and My Afro on Channel 4.

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