BBC News-Nobel Poet Soyinka Picks "Will Smith Look-Alike" for BBC Win

Nobel Laureate Wole Soyinka and Ugandan playwright and BBC competition winner Deborah Asiimwe/BBC News

(Story reported by Charlotte Attwood)

Our judge this year was Nobel Laureate Professor Wole Soyinka. He has chosen Will Smith Look-Alike, written by Deborah Asiimwe of Uganda as the winning play of the annual BBC World Service African Performance playwriting competition.

'I thought the writing was very good and I became really caught up with the play wondering what the final denouement would be.' Wole Soyinka on Will Smith Look-Alike.

Will Smith Look-Alike tells the tale of a 17-year-old schoolboy Tereka, who hears that his school music group is entering a national competition. The winners will travel to perform in New York, so he joins the group as a Marimba player.

Once in the Big Apple he escapes from the group thinking he will have better opportunities in America, especially as he believes he could pass as a double for the famous American actor Will Smith.

Instead, Tereka finds himself alone, hungry and homeless, and while trying to escape from the attentions of the police, he befriends a homeless Jamaican woman called Liz.

She takes him under her wing and makes him realise that America is not everything that it might seem on TV.

(click here and here to read the full stories and hear the audio link for the winning play, "Will Smith Look-Alke" on the BBC News website)