. He enrolled at the universities at Ibadan and Leeds, both in Britain, and he received his Ph.D. in 1973. He worked for two years as a dramaturge at the Royal Court Theatre before returning to Nigeria, where he taught literature and drama at a number of universities and founded the theater group "The 1960 Masks". In 1964 he founded the Orisun Theatre Company, which he has used to produce his own plays. He published his first novel in 1965, The Interpreters, written in English. Soyinka was imprisoned from 1967 to 1969 during the civil war in Nigeria for the crime of writing an article in which he appealed for a cease fire, and his experience in solitary confinement would be the basis for his book The Man Died: Prison Notes. Soyinka is best known in Africa and the West for his plays and poetry. He has written more than twenty works and has adapted a number of Western dramas for production in Nigeria, giving works such as The Bacchae of Euripedes, Brecht's Threepenny Opera, and Genet's The Blacks an African context. His c
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