Overview

• Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o died on May 28, 2025, in Bedford, Georgia, at the age of 87, his daughter Wanjiku announced on social media.
• Kenyan president William Ruto and opposition leader Raila Odinga joined Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka and other voices in honoring his impact on literature and social justice.
• Amnesty International hailed him as a “freedom writer” and scholars pointed to Decolonising the Mind and his decision to write in Gikuyu as pivotal acts of linguistic decolonization.
• He was imprisoned without trial in 1977 for co-writing the play Ngaahika Ndeenda and later spent decades in self-imposed exile as a professor at institutions including the University of California, Irvine
• Over six decades he produced landmark novels, essays and plays—including Weep Not, Child and Wizard of the Crow—and remained a perennial Nobel Prize contender despite never winning.