Ngugi wa Thiong'o

Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, born in Kenya in 1938, was a Kenyan writer and cultural scholar. He studied at Makerere University College in Kampala and at the University of Leeds. His novels and literary and political essays established him as one of Africa’s major writers. In 1977, he was arrested in Kenya in connection with a play and detained without charge for a year; in 1982, he left the country. He taught at institutions including Yale University, New York University, and the University of California, Irvine. In 2019, he received the Erich Maria Remarque Peace Prize from the city of Osnabrück.