Kenyan writer and academic Ngũgĩ Wa Thiong’o passed away in Buford, Georgia, United States on Wednesday, May 28, 2025.
Ngugi Wa Thiong’o was a Kenyan writer and academic who was born in Kamiriithu, near Limuru, on January 5, 1938. He attended Alliance High School before studying at Makerere University College in Kampala, Uganda, where he received his B.A. in English in 1963.
As a student, he attended the African Writers Conference held at Makerere in June 1962, and his play The Black Hermit premiered as part of the event at the National Theatre in Kampala.
Ngũgĩ’s debut novel, Weep Not, Child, the first in English by a writer from East Africa, was published in Heinemann’s African Writers Series with Chinua Achebe as its advisory editor in May 1964. He would go on to write many other novels, including The River Between (1965), A Grain of Wheat (1967), Petals of Blood (1977), Caitaani Mutharaba-Ini (Devil on the Cross, 1980), Matigari ma Njiruungi (1986) (Matigari, translated into English by Wangui wa Goro, 1989), Mũrogi wa Kagogo (Wizard of the Crow, 2006), and The Perfect Nine: The Epic of Gĩkũyũ and Mũmbi (2020).
He wrote the memoirs Detained: A Writer’s Prison Diary (1981), while detained at Kamiti Prison, Dreams in a Time of War: a Childhood Memoir (2010), In the House of the Interpreter: A Memoir (2012), Birth of a Dream Weaver: A Memoir of a Writer’s Awakening (2016), and Wrestling with the devil: A Prison Memoir (2018).
He had nonfiction offerings, the most famous of which was Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature (1986), a collection of essays about language and its constructive role in national culture, history, and identity. Others included Homecoming: Essays on African and Caribbean Literature, Culture and Politics (1972), Barrel of a Pen: Resistance to Repression in Neo-Colonial Kenya (1983), Writing against Neo-Colonialism (1986), and Penpoints, Gunpoints and Dreams: The Performance of Literature and Power in Post-Colonial Africa (2009).
He also wrote short story collections and books for children while receiving many honorary degrees from colleges and universities across the world. He won numerous awards for his work, including the PEN/Nabokov Award for Achievement in International Literature, Premi Internacional Catalunya, Erich-Maria-Remarque Peace Prize, Grand Prix des Mécènes, Pak Kyong-ni Literature Award.
He fled into exile in 1982 and lived abroad for the rest of his adult life. His last role was as Distinguished Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Irvine.
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