

The award was presented by Margarita Al, President of the World Organization of WOW Writers in Rabat, Morocco on Tuesday, July 9, 2024.
A high point of the historic event, which held at The Academy of the Kingdom of Morocco, Rabat, Morocco, in commemoration of Professor Soyinka’s 90th birthday, was the
Professor Soyinka was born on July 13, 1934 in Abeokuta, Nigeria, and among his best known works are The Man Died: The Prison Notes of Wole Soyinka, Death and the King’s Horseman, The Lion and the Jewel, Kongi’s Harvest, The Trials of Brother Jero, The Interpreters, A Shuttle in the Crypt, Ake: The Years of Childhood, Idanre, and Season of Anomy.
The Academy of the Kingdom of Morocco is a multidisciplinary public institution with legal and financial autonomy. It was, according to Wikipedia, founded by King Hassan 11 on October 8, 1977, “with the objective of contributing to the development and promotion of scientific research, particularly in the fields of humanities, culture and arts.”
PAWA, on its part, is a Non-Governmental Organization (NGO), based in Ghana, which serves as an umbrella body of writers across the African continent and the Diaspora. It has as its Secretary General, Dr. Wale Okediran, a former National President of the Association of Nigerian Authors (ANA), a former federal legislator and a trained medical doctor turned author of 14 novels and two collections of Travel Stories, some of which have won Literary Prizes within and outside Nigeria.