Wole Soyinka was born in 1934 in Western Nigeria. He has written poetry, plays and fiction. He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1986. He came to England as a young man in the late 1950s, and the events in ‘Telephone Conversation’ relate to this period, when there were no equality laws to prevent landlords from discriminating against different ethnic groups when renting out houses or flats, as there are now.