Meet Nobel Prizewinner Wole Soyinka in Bozar

"I think sometimes of poems I have lost," the Nigerian writer and Nobel Prizewinner Wole Soyinka once wrote in a poem. "Maybe their loss it was that saved the world – still / They do get lost, and I recall them only / When a fragment levitates behind." We can be thankful that, apart from a few lost poems, so much of Soyinka's writing has been preserved.

His novel The Interpreters, for example, set in Lagos in newly independent Nigeria. Or his second novel, Season of Anomy, which can be read as a critique of the heavily militarised state of his country. As well as novels, he has also written autobiographical works, including The Man Died: Prison Notes, which deals with his experience in prison, where he found himself in the 1960s because of his criticism of the regime. In Aké: The Years of Childhood, he writes about his home village, from which the book takes its name. In the course of his academic career, he has worked in a number of universities, as a professor of comparative literature, among other things. "I like to say, I spend one-third of my time in Nigeria, one-third in Europe or America, and one-third on a plane," he told a Guardian interviewer.

Soyinka, who moves between cultures, writes for the most part in English, but with lots of references to the Yoruba language and culture that he grew up in. In 1986, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, in recognition of the way in which, "in a wide cultural perspective and with poetic overtones", he gives expression to the "drama of existence".

Wole Soyinka, 21/9, 20.00, Bozar