Episode description

This month, to kick off a mini-season to celebrate a very special centenary World Book Club talks, for a second time, to the Nobel Prize-winning giant of world literature, Professor Wole Soyinka, about one hundred years of the writers’ organisation English PEN. PEN is the influential pressure group which helps support and campaign for the release of writers held unlawfully in jail around the globe and which helped to secure Soyinka’s release in 1969, after 26 months of detention without trial by the military regime in Nigeria.

Guest presenter Ritula Shah also discusses Wole Soyinka’s first new novel in half a century with the author and his readers around the world: Chronicles from the Land of the Happiest People on Earth is a bitingly witty whodunit, a scathing indictment of Nigeria’s ruling elite, and a powerful call to arms from one of the country’s most relentless political activists and world-famous writer.

(Picture: Wole Soyinka. Photo credit: Simone Padovani/Awakening/Getty Images.)