Kenyan · b. 1938
Ngugi wa Thiong'o is a Kenyan novelist, essayist, and playwright, and one of the most important African writers of the twentieth century. He was a leading figure of African literary modernism before renouncing English as a literary language after his imprisonment by the Kenyan government in 1977. He has since written his major fiction in Kikuyu and is a perennial candidate for the Nobel Prize in Literature. He has taught at Yale, New York University, and the University of California, Irvine.