Overview
- Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o died on May 28 in Atlanta at age 87, his daughter Wanjiku wa Ngũgĩ announced on Facebook.
- Widely regarded as East Africa’s most influential writer and a perennial Nobel Prize contender, he abandoned English after his 1977 imprisonment and championed literature in Kikuyu and Swahili.
- He was jailed in 1977 for co-writing the Kikuyu play Ngaahika Ndeenda, designated a prisoner of conscience by Amnesty International, and went into self-imposed exile from 1982, later teaching at institutions including the University of California, Irvine.
- His prolific body of work spans Weep Not, Child (1964), Devil on the Cross (1980), Wizard of the Crow (2006) and the novel-in-verse The Perfect Nine, which received an International Booker Prize nomination in 2021.
- During a 2004 visit to Kenya he and his wife were attacked by armed assailants, an assault that left him beaten and his wife raped.