Author, poet, playwright, and academic Ama Ata Aidoo passed away in Accra, Ghana on Wednesday, May 31, 2023.
Ama Ata Aidoo was born in Abeadzi Kyiakor, near Saltpond, in the Central Region of Ghana on 23 March 1942. She attended Wesley Girls’ Senior High School in Cape Coast from 1961 to 1964 then enrolled at the University of Ghana, Legon, where she obtained the degree of Bachelor of Arts in English and also wrote her first play, The Dilemma of a Ghost (1964). The play was published by Longman in the following year making her the first published African woman dramatist. She held a fellowship in creative writing at Stanford University in California before returning to Ghana in 1969 to teach English at the University of Ghana. She served as a research fellow at the Institute of African Studies and as a lecturer in English at the University of Cape Coast, where she eventually rose to the position of professor.
Apart from her initial play, she also wrote prose, poetry, short stories for adults and children, and more. Some of the titles were Anowa (1970), No Sweetness Here: A Collection of Short Stories (1970) Our Sister Killjoy: or Reflections from a Black-eyed Squint (1977), Someone Talking to Sometime (1986), The Eagle and the Chickens and Other Stories (1986), Birds and Other Poems (1987), An Angry Letter in January (1992), Changes: A Love Story (1991), The Girl Who Can and Other Stories (1997), and Diplomatic Pounds & Other Stories (2012). She also edited the anthology African Love Stories: An Anthology in 2016.
She was given many recognitions for her work such as the 1992 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best Book (Africa) for her novel Changes. The Aidoo-Snyder Book Prize, awarded by the Women’s Caucus of the African Studies Association for an outstanding book published by a woman that prioritizes African women’s experiences, is named in honour of Ama Ata Aidoo and of Margaret C. Snyder, who was the founding director of UNIFEM. The Ama Ata Aidoo Centre for Creative Writing (Aidoo Centre), under the auspices of the Kojo Yankah School of Communications Studies at the African University College of Communications was named in her honour in 2017.
The 2014 documentary film, The Art of Ama Ata Aidoo, from Yaba Badoe which has gotten international acclaim featured the story of the life of the celebrated Ghanaian. Here is something from that documentary;
Read more about the beloved author by clicking here.
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