Ngugi wa Thiong'o

Born in 1938, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, early work was written in English under the name of James Ngugi. Novels such as The River Between (1965), A Grain of Wheat (1967), and Petals of Blood (1977) established his reputation as the foremost writer in post-Independence Kenya. In the 1970s, he abandoned English for Gikuyu and Swahili, writing his critical apologia on this subject in Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature (1986). Other Anglophone works of literary and cultural criticism include the trans-Atlantic Homecoming: Essays on African and Caribbean Literature, Culture, and Politics (1972), Barrel of a Pen: Resistance to Repression in Neo-Colonial Kenya (1983), and Moving the Center: The Struggle for Cultural Freedom (1993). Subsequent of the performance of his play, Ngaahika Ndeenda (I Will Marry When I Want), he was imprisoned without charge by the Kenyan authorities in a maximum security prison at the end of 1977. The period of his incarceration produced two notable works: the Gikuyu novel Caitaani Mutharabaini, published in translation as Devil on the Cross (1987), and his memoirs, Detained: A Writer's Prison Diary (1981). The novel Murogi wa Kagogo was recently published in English as Wizard of the Crow (2006), from a translation by the author. Having lived and taught for many years in the United States at universities such as Yale and NYU, Ngugi is currently Director of the Center for Writing and Translation, and Distinguished Professor of English and Comparative Literature, at the University of California, Irvine.

For an expanded biography of Ngugi wa Thiong’o, see:
http://www.humanities.uci.edu/icwt/news/ngugi_bio.html