The recipient of this year's Nobel Prize for Literature was announced today. He is Wole Soyinka, a fifty-two-year-old Nigerian playwright and an author. Soyinka's best known work in this country is probably Ake , his childhood memoir. Soyinka is the first African and the first black to win the distinguished prize for literature. And he was in Paris today when he heard the news. Melodie Walker reports.
Wole Soyinka is in Paris to attend a meeting of International Theatre Institute, a non-governmental organization at UNESCO headquarters. Appearing somewhat annoyed by the crowd of reporters who cornered him in a lounge at UNESCO, the Nigerian writer confessed that he wasn't really prepared for the onslaught of instant Nobel prize fame.
"I am not really enjoying it, honestly. It's ... I had no psychological preparation. You know, I'm just into it like that, you know. If I'd had some notice and I'd been able to, you know, prepare myself, you know, like an athlete going into combat, into competition perhaps, but this was rather sudden. You know, really, really sudden, totally unexpected."
Soyinka says he accepted the news of the Nobel Prize for Literature with the deep sense of honor, but not for himself alone. He says the award goes beyond his individual work and honors all African writers.
"I don't believe in literally prizes. And therefore when I view the literary prize, I tend to see the prize in a much larger context than the individual writer, because how do you judge works of literature? How do you compare works of literature from different cultures? It's an almost impossible task. So certain contradictions must go into the choice of somebody to receive an award of this kind. And that, those contradictions must go outside of the person himself. It has to do with the context. Without any compromise in literary qualities, I do not believe that I'm considered a bad writer; that's why I've been given this prize. No, don't misunderstand me. But I'm saying that it's more than just being an acceptable writer who gives some kind of literary pleasure to discerning, sophisticated people. It goes beyond that. It has to do with the significance of this occasional symbolic event. And it is very much a symbolic event. It's for all the African writers, for even the third would, for even the universal literature, because it opens the universe to the literature not merely of the recipient of the prize, but of the society from which his literature comes. It opens, then, certain nuggets, literary and artistic nuggets which they have taken for granted, which they have relegated to the exotica. So it's a symbolic prize, and I view it as such ..."
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