Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o
Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o was a Kenyan author and academic, who was described as East Africa's leading novelist.
He began writing in English before later switching to write primarily in Gikuyu, becoming a strong advocate for literature written in native African languages. His works include the celebrated novel The River Between, plays, short stories, and essays, ranging from literary and social criticism to children's literature. He was the founder and editor of the Gikuyu-language journal Mũtĩiri. His short story The Upright Revolution: Or Why Humans Walk Upright was translated into more than 100 languages.
In 1977, Ngũgĩ embarked upon a novel form of theatre in Kenya that sought to liberate the theatrical process from what he held to be "the genera
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Michael Ignatieff
Michael Grant Ignatieff is a Canadian author, academic and former politician. He was the leader of the Liberal Party of Canada and Leader of the Official Opposition from 2008 until 2011. Known for his work as a historian, Ignatieff has held senior academic posts at the University of Cambridge, the University of Oxford, Harvard University and the University of Toronto.
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John Kiriamiti
John Batista Wanjohi Kiriamiti was born on 14 February, 1950 in Thuita Village, Kamacharia Location of Murang'a District in Central Kenya, he is the second of nine children born to Albert and Anne Wanjiru Kiriamiti, both primary school teachers (now retired) in Murang'a.
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Kiriamiti studied for and passed his Certificate of Primary Education (CPE) at the local primary school in Thuita Village. He was privileged to be among the first nine African students to join the dominantly‐white Prince of Wales School (now Nairobi School) at a time when most Africans could not afford the Ksh 1,080 school fees charged. Although Kiriamiti received bursaries as a gifted African student, he joined Prince of Wales school as a day scholar and stayed with his unc -
Keon West
Professor of Social Psychology at The University of London, and an expert on identity, prejudice, and representation.
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Born in Trinidad, grew up in Jamaica, and studied in the USA and France before going to the UK as a Rhodes scholar in 2006 to do a doctorate at Oxford University. -
Mahmood Mamdani
Mahmood Mamdani is Herbert Lehman Professor of Government and Professor of Anthropology and of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies (MESAAS) at Columbia University and Director of the Makerere Institute of Social Research in Kampala. He is the author of Citizen and Subject, When Victims Become Killers, and Good Muslim, Bad Muslim.
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Robert Farris Thompson
Robert Farris Thompson is a professor of the Art History at Yale University. He specializes in African and African-American art.
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Paul Gilroy
Paul Gilroy is an English sociologist and cultural studies scholar who is Professor of the Humanities and the founding Director of the Sarah Parker Remond Centre for the Study of Race and Racism at University College, London.
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Francis Imbuga
Professor Francis Davis Imbuga (1947 – November 18, 2012) was a Kenyan playwright and literature scholar whose works, including Aminata and Betrayal in the City, have become staples in the study of literature schools in Kenya. His works have consistently dealt with issues such as the clashes of modernity and tradition in the social organisation of African communities. His play Betrayal in the City was Kenya's entry to FESTAC.
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He also taught literature at Kenyatta University, holding the posts of Dean of the Literature Department, Dean of Arts and Director of Quality Assurance.
Imbuga died on the night of Sunday 18 November 2012, after suffering a stroke in his house in Nairobi.
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Trifonia Melibea Obono
Trifonia Melibea Obono (Equatorial Guinea, 1982) is a journalist and political scientist, as well as a professor and researcher on women and gender in Africa. She has been a professor in the literature and social sciences faculty of the UNGE (National University of Equatorial Guinea) in Malabo since 2013 and is part of the team of the Afro-Hispanic Studies Center of the UNED. She is finishing her PhD in interdisciplinary studies in gender and equality at the University of Salamanca. She has contributed to numerous national and foreign publications, and is the author of two novels, Herencia de bindendee (Ediciones del Auge, 2016) and La bastarda (Flores Raras, 2016), the latter of which is forthcoming from The Feminist Press in 2018, transla
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Achille Mbembe
Joseph-Achille Mbembe, known as Achille Mbembe (born 1957), is a Cameroonian philosopher, political theorist, and public intellectual.
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He has written extensively in African history and politics, including La naissance du maquis dans le Sud-Cameroun (Paris, Karthala, 1996). On the Postcolony was published in Paris in 2000 in French and the English translation was published by the University of California Press, Berkeley, in 2001. In 2015, Wits University Press published a new, African edition. He has an A1 rating from the National Research Foundation. -
Samuel Butler
For the author of Hudibras, see Samuel Butler.
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Samuel Butler was an iconoclastic Victorian author who published a variety of works, including the Utopian satire Erewhon and the posthumous novel The Way of All Flesh, his two best-known works, but also extending to examinations of Christian orthodoxy, substantive studies of evolutionary thought, studies of Italian art, and works of literary history and criticism. Butler also made prose translations of The Iliad and The Odyssey which remain in use to this day.
See also: Samuel H. Butcher, Anglo-Irish classicist, who also undertook prose translations of Homer's works (in collaboration with Andrew Lang. -
Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor
Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor (born 1968) is a Kenyan writer, who was named "Woman of the Year" by Eve Magazine in Kenya in 2004 for her contribution to the country's literature and arts. She won the 2003 Caine Prize for African Writing for her story "Weight of Whispers", which considers an aristocratic Rwandan refugee in Kenya. The story was originally published in Kwani?, the Kenyan literary magazine set up by Binyavanga Wainaina after he won the Caine Prize the previous year.
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Born in Nairobi, Owuor studied English at Jomo Kenyatta University, before taking an MA in TV/Video development at Reading University. She has worked as a screenwriter and was the Executive Director of the Zanzibar International Film Festival from 2003 to 2005. Her short sto -
Ayi Kwei Armah
Born to Fante-speaking parents, with his father's side Armah descending from a royal family in the Ga tribe in the port city of Sekondi-Takoradi, Ghana, [1] Armah, having attended the renowned Achimota School, left Ghana in 1959 to attend Groton School in Groton, MA. After graduating, he entered Harvard University, receiving a degree in sociology. Armah then moved to Algeria and worked as a translator for the magazine Révolution Africaine. In 1964, Armah returned to Ghana, where he was a scriptwriter for Ghana Television and later taught English at the Navrongo School.
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Between 1967 and 1968, he was editor of Jeune Afrique magazine in Paris. From 1968-1970, Armah studied at Columbia University, obtaining his MFA in creative writing. In the 19 -
Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò
Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò (b. 1956) is a philosopher and professor at Cornell University.
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See also: Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò, philosopher at Georgetown University. -
Merle Hodge
Merle Hodge (born 1944) is a Trinidadian novelist and critic. Her 1970 novel Crick Crack, Monkey is a classic of West Indian literature.
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Merle Hodge was born in 1944, in Curepe, Trinidad, the daughter of an immigration officer. She received both her elementary and high-school education in Trinidad, and as a student of Bishop Anstey High School, she won the Trinidad and Tobago Girls' Island Scholarship in 1962. The scholarship allowed her to attend University College, London, where she pursued studies in French. In 1965 she completed her B.A. Hons. and received a Master of Philosophy degree in 1967, the focus of which concerned the poetry of the French Guyanese writer Léon Damas.
Hodge did quite a bit of traveling after obtaining her degree, w -
Germano Almeida
Germano de Almeida nasceu na ilha da Boavista, Cabo Verde, em 1945. Licenciou-se em Direito em Lisboa e exerce actualmente advocacia na cidade do Mindelo. Estreou-se como contista no início da década de 80, colaborando na revista Ponto & Vírgula. A sua obra de ficção representa uma nova etapa na rica história literária de Cabo Verde. Está publicada em Portugal pela Caminho e começa a despertar interesse no estrangeiro, nomeadamente o romance O Testamento do Senhor Napumoceno da Silva Araújo, do qual vários países compraram os direitos, encontrando-se já publicado no Brasil, na Itália e França. O filme de baseado nesta obra (O Testamento do Senhor Napumoceno) foi recentemente galardoado com o 1º Prémio do Festival de Cinema Latino-Americano
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Niq Mhlongo
Mhlongo was born in Midway-Chiawelo, Soweto, the seventh of nine children, and raised in Soweto. His father, who died when Mhlongo was a teenager, worked as a post-office sweeper. Mhlongo was sent to Limpopo Province, the province his mother came from, to finish high school. Initially failing his matriculation exam in October 1990,[1] Mhlongo completed his matric at Malenga High School in 1991. He studied African literature and political studies at the University of the Witwatersrand, gaining a BA in 1996. In 1997 he enrolled to study law there, transferring to the University of Cape Town the following year. In 2000 he discontinued university study to write his first novel, Dog Eat Dog.[2]
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He has been called, "one of the most high-spirited a -
Charles King
Charles King is a New York Times-bestselling author and a professor at Georgetown University. His books include EVERY VALLEY (2024), on the making of Handel's Messiah, which was a New York Times Notable Book; GODS OF THE UPPER AIR (2019), on the reinvention of race and gender in the early twentieth century, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and winner of the Francis Parkman Prize and the Anisfield-Wolf Award; MIDNIGHT AT THE PERA PALACE (2014), on the birth of modern Istanbul, which was the inspiration for a Netflix series of the same name; and ODESSA (2011), winner of a National Jewish Book Award.
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Anna Kornbluh
Anna Kornbluh is Associate Professor of English at UIC. She is the author of Realizing Capital, and the manuscript, The Order of Forms: Realism, Formalism, and Social Space. Articles on Marxist aesthetics have appeared in Mediations, Novel, the LARB, Understanding Film: Marxist Perspectives, Lacan & Contemporary Cinema, and the Bloomsbury Companion to Marx.
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Mason Funk
Mason Funk was born in Los Angeles in 1958, graduated from Stanford University, and lived in Tacoma, Washington, Portland, Maine and Lisbon, Portugal before returning to Los Angeles and beginning his career as an award-winning writer/producer of non-fiction television programs and documentary films. His TV and film projects have covered topics ranging from Mother Teresa to the history of secret White House recordings to the long-term effects of concussions in professional football to an American teenager's quest to keep her undocumented Guatemalan mother from being deported. He has received two Emmy nominations for his work in television. In 2016, Mason launched OUTWORDS to capture the timeless, inspiring stories of LGBTQ pioneers and elder
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Okey Ndibe
Okey Ndibe teaches African and African Diaspora literatures at Brown University. He earned MFA and PhD degrees from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and has taught at Connecticut College, Bard College, Trinity College, and the University of Lagos (as a Fulbright scholar). He is the author of Arrows of Rain and Foreign Gods, Inc. He has served on the editorial board of Hartford Courant where his essays won national and state awards. He lives in West Hartford, CT, with his wife, Sheri, and their three children.
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Barbara Kimenye
Barbara Kimenye (19 December 1929 – 12 August 2012), was one of East Africa's most popular and best-selling children's authors. Her books sold more than a million copies, not just in Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania, but throughout English-speaking Africa. She wrote more than 50 titles and is best remembered for her Moses series, about a mischievous student at a boarding school for troublesome boys.
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A prolific writer widely regarded as "the leading writer of Children's literature in Uganda", Barbara Kimenye was among the first Anglophone Ugandan women writers to be published in Central and East Africa. Her stories were extensively read in Uganda and beyond and were widely used in African schools. Kimenye was born in England, but by her own admissi -
Dipo Faloyin
"Dipo Faloyin is a Senior Editor at VICE, where he focuses on race, culture, and identity around the world. His writing has also appeared in Dazed, Prospect, Huffington Post, and Refinery 29 among other publications. Born in Chicago, raised in Nigeria, he currently lives in London." -- Library of Congress Authorities
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Claude McKay
Jamaican-born American writer Claude McKay figured prominently in the Harlem renaissance of the 1920s; his works include collections of poetry, such as Constab Ballads (1912), and novels, including Home to Harlem (1928).
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Home to Harlem, a best-seller, won Festus Claudius McKay, a poet and a seminal figure, the Harmon gold award for literature.
He also wrote novels Banjo and Banana Bottom . People not yet published his manuscript, called Amiable with Big Teeth: A Novel of the Love Affair between the Communists and the Poor Black Sheep of Harlem , of 1941.
McKay also authored collections of poetry, a collection of short stories, Gingertown . He authored two autobiographical books, A Long Way from Home and My Green H -
Nella Larsen
Nellallitea 'Nella' Larsen (first called Nellie Walker) was an American novelist of the Harlem Renaissance who wrote two novels and a few short stories. Though her literary output was scant, what she wrote earned her recognition by her contemporaries and by present-day critics.
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Michela Wrong
Half-Italian, half-British, Michela Wrong was born in 1961. She grew up in London and took a degree in Philosophy and Social Sciences at Jesus College, Cambridge and a diploma in journalism at Cardiff.
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She joined Reuters news agency in the early 1980s and was posted as a foreign correspondent to Italy, France and Ivory Coast. She became a freelance journalist in 1994, when she moved to then-Zaire and found herself covering both the genocide in neighbouring Rwanda and the final days of dictator Mobutu Sese Seko for the BBC and Reuters. She later moved to Kenya, where she spent four years covering east, west and central Africa for the Financial Times newspaper.
In 2000 she published her first book, "In the Footsteps of Mr Kurtz", the story of M -
Dario Fo
Dario Fo was an Italian satirist, playwright, theatre director, actor, and composer. He received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1997. In 2007 he was ranked Joint Seventh with Stephen Hawking in The Telegraph's list of 100 greatest living geniuses. His dramatic work employed comedic methods of the ancient Italian commedia dell'arte, a theatrical style popular with the proletarian classes. He owned and operated a theatre company with his wife, the leading actress Franca Rame. Dario Fo died in Milan on October 13th 2016, at the age of 90.
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Amy Levy
Levy was born in Clapham, London, the second daughter of Lewis Levy and Isobel Levin. Her Jewish family was mildly observant, but as an adult Levy no longer practised Judaism; she continued to identify with the Jews as a people.
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She was educated at Brighton High School, Brighton, and studied at Newnham College, Cambridge; she was the first Jewish student at Newnham, when she arrived in 1879, but left after four terms.
Her circle of friends included Clementina Black, Dollie Radford, Eleanor Marx (daughter of Karl Marx), and Olive Schreiner. Levy wrote stories, essays, and poems for periodicals, some popular and others literary. Her writing career began early; her poem "Ida Grey" appearing in the journal the Pelican when she was only fourteen. -
Francis Imbuga
Professor Francis Davis Imbuga (1947 – November 18, 2012) was a Kenyan playwright and literature scholar whose works, including Aminata and Betrayal in the City, have become staples in the study of literature schools in Kenya. His works have consistently dealt with issues such as the clashes of modernity and tradition in the social organisation of African communities. His play Betrayal in the City was Kenya's entry to FESTAC.
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He also taught literature at Kenyatta University, holding the posts of Dean of the Literature Department, Dean of Arts and Director of Quality Assurance.
Imbuga died on the night of Sunday 18 November 2012, after suffering a stroke in his house in Nairobi.
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Stefanie Stahl
Stefanie Stahl ist es gelungen, sich im Dschungel der psychologischen Ratgeber Literatur einen Namen zu machen. Sie begeistert durch ihren unterhaltsamen und verständlichen Stil und die vielen Aha-Erlebnisse, die sie ihren Lesern und Leserinnen vermittelt. Ihr Buch "Jein! Bindungsängste erkennen und bewältigen" wird nicht nur von Laien mit Begeisterung aufgenommen, sondern gilt auch in Fachkreisen als Standardwerk.
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Stefanie Stahl, Jahrgang 63, ist in Hamburg geboren und aufgewachsen und hat an der Universität Trier Psychologie studiert. Sie arbeitet als Psychotherapeutin, psychologische Sachverständige und Buchautorin in freier Praxis in Trier. Zudem hält sie im deutschsprachigen Raum Seminare zum Thema Bindungsangst. Weitere Informationen f -
Mariama Bâ
Mariama Bâ (1929 – 1981) was a Senegalese author and feminist, who wrote in French. Born in Dakar, she was raised a Muslim, but at an early age came to criticise what she perceived as inequalities between the sexes resulting from [African] traditions. Raised by her traditional grandparents, she had to struggle even to gain an education, because they did not believe that girls should be taught. Bâ later married a Senegalese member of Parliament, Obèye Diop, but divorced him and was left to care for their nine children.
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Her frustration with the fate of African women—as well as her ultimate acceptance of it—is expressed in her first novel, So Long a Letter. In it she depicts the sorrow and resignation of a woman who must share the mourning for -
Ayi Kwei Armah
Born to Fante-speaking parents, with his father's side Armah descending from a royal family in the Ga tribe in the port city of Sekondi-Takoradi, Ghana, [1] Armah, having attended the renowned Achimota School, left Ghana in 1959 to attend Groton School in Groton, MA. After graduating, he entered Harvard University, receiving a degree in sociology. Armah then moved to Algeria and worked as a translator for the magazine Révolution Africaine. In 1964, Armah returned to Ghana, where he was a scriptwriter for Ghana Television and later taught English at the Navrongo School.
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Between 1967 and 1968, he was editor of Jeune Afrique magazine in Paris. From 1968-1970, Armah studied at Columbia University, obtaining his MFA in creative writing. In the 19 -
Albert Memmi
Tunisian Jewish writer and essayist who migrated to France.
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Born in Tunisia under French protectorate, from a Tunisian Jewish mother, Marguerite Sarfati, and a Tunisian-Italian Jewish father, François Memmi, he speaks French and Tunisian-Judeo-Arabic. He claims to be of Berber ancestry. He was educated in French primary schools, and continued on to the Carnot high school in Tunis, the University of Algiers where he studied philosophy, and finally the Sorbonne in Paris. Albert Memmi found himself at the crossroads of three cultures, and based his work on the difficulty of finding a balance between the East and the West.
His best-known nonfiction work is "The Colonizer and the Colonized", about the interdependent relationship of the two groups. -
Tsitsi Dangarembga
Spent part of her childhood in England. She began her education there, but concluded her A-levels in a missionary school back home, in the town of Mutare. She later studied medicine at Cambridge University, but became homesick and returned home as Zimbabwe's black-majority rule began in 1980.
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She took up psychology at the University of Zimbabwe, of whose drama group she was a member. She also held down a two-year job as a copywriter at a marketing agency. This early writing experience gave her an avenue for expression: she wrote numerous plays, such as The Lost of the Soil, and then joined the theatre group Zambuko, and participated in the production of two plays, Katshaa and Mavambo.
In 1985, Dangarembga published a short story in Sweden cal -
Ousmane Sembène
Ousmane Sembène often credited in the French style as Sembène Ousmane in articles and reference works, was a Senegalese film director, producer and writer. The Los Angeles Times considered him one of the greatest authors of Africa and has often been called the "Father of African film."
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Aimé Césaire
Martinique-born poet, playwright, and politician Aimé Fernand Césaire contributed to the development of the concept of negritude; his primarily surrealist works include The Miracle Weapons (1946) and A Tempest (1969).
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A francophone author of African descent. His books of include Lost Body, with illustrations by Pablo Picasso, Aimé Césaire: The Collected Poetry, and Return to My Native Land. He is also the author of Discourse on Colonialism, a book of essays which has become a classic text of French political literature and helped establish the literary and ideological movement Negritude, a term Césaire defined as “the simple recognition of the fact that one is black, the acceptance of this fact and of our destiny as blacks, of our h -
Shelagh Delaney
A British playwright, best known for her debut work, A Taste of Honey.
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Frantz Fanon
Frantz Fanon was a psychiatrist, philosopher, revolutionary, and author from Martinique. He was influential in the field of post-colonial studies and was perhaps the pre-eminent thinker of the 20th century on the issue of decolonization and the psychopathology of colonization. His works have inspired anti-colonial liberation movements for more than four decades.
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Audre Lorde
Audre Lorde was a revolutionary Black feminist. Lorde's poetry was published very regularly during the 1960s — in Langston Hughes' 1962 New Negro Poets, USA; in several foreign anthologies; and in black literary magazines. During this time, she was politically active in civil rights, anti-war, and feminist movements. Her first volume of poetry, The First Cities (1968), was published by the Poet's Press and edited by Diane di Prima, a former classmate and friend from Hunter College High School. Dudley Randall, a poet and critic, asserted in his review of the book that Lorde "does not wave a black flag, but her blackness is there, implicit, in the bone."
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Her second volume, Cables to Rage (1970), which was mainly written during her tenure at To -
Chinua Achebe
Works, including the novel Things Fall Apart (1958), of Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe describe traditional African life in conflict with colonial rule and westernization.
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This poet and critic served as professor at Brown University. People best know and most widely read his first book in modern African literature.
Christian parents in the Igbo town of Ogidi in southeastern Nigeria reared Achebe, who excelled at school and won a scholarship for undergraduate studies. World religions and traditional African cultures fascinated him, who began stories as a university student. After graduation, he worked for the Nigerian broadcasting service and quickly moved to the metropolis of Lagos. He gained worldwide attention in the late 1950s; his la -
George Bernard Shaw
George Bernard Shaw was an Irish playwright, socialist, and a co-founder of the London School of Economics. Although his first profitable writing was music and literary criticism, in which capacity he wrote many highly articulate pieces of journalism, his main talent was for drama. Over the course of his life he wrote more than 60 plays. Nearly all his plays address prevailing social problems, but each also includes a vein of comedy that makes their stark themes more palatable. In these works Shaw examined education, marriage, religion, government, health care, and class privilege.
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An ardent socialist, Shaw was angered by what he perceived to be the exploitation of the working class. He wrote many brochures and speeches for the Fabian Societ -
David Malouf
David Malouf is a celebrated Australian poet, novelist, librettist, playwright, and essayist whose work has garnered international acclaim. Known for his lyrical prose and explorations of identity, memory, and place, Malouf began his literary career in poetry before gaining recognition for his fiction. His 1990 novel The Great World won the Miles Franklin Award and several other major prizes, while Remembering Babylon (1993) earned a Booker Prize nomination and multiple international honors.
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Malouf has taught at universities in Australia and the UK, delivered the prestigious Boyer Lectures, and written libretti for acclaimed operas. Born in Brisbane to a Lebanese father and a mother of Sephardi Jewish heritage, he draws on both Australian an -
Edwidge Danticat
Edwidge Danticat is a Haitian American novelist and short story writer. Her first novel, Breath, Eyes, Memory, was published in 1994 and went on to become an Oprah's Book Club selection. Danticat has since written or edited several books and has been the recipient of many awards and honors. Her work has dealt with themes of national identity, mother-daughter relationships, and diasporic politics. In 2023, she was named the Wun Tsun Tam Mellon Professor of the Humanities in the department of African American and African Diaspora Studies at Columbia University.
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Aldous Huxley
Aldous Leonard Huxley was an English writer and philosopher. His bibliography spans nearly 50 books, including non-fiction works, as well as essays, narratives, and poems.
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Born into the prominent Huxley family, he graduated from Balliol College, Oxford, with a degree in English literature. Early in his career, he published short stories and poetry and edited the literary magazine Oxford Poetry, before going on to publish travel writing, satire, and screenplays. He spent the latter part of his life in the United States, living in Los Angeles from 1937 until his death. By the end of his life, Huxley was widely acknowledged as one of the foremost intellectuals of his time. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature nine times, and was e -
Nadina Galle
Born in the Netherlands and raised in Canada, Nadina Galle developed a deep love for the outdoors and a lifelong commitment to conserving nature from an early age. Inspired as a teenager by trailblazing urbanists like Jane Jacobs and James Howard Kunstler, she began questioning the imbalance between nature and the sprawling suburbs she saw around her.
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Ama Ata Aidoo
Ama Ata Aidoo was a Ghanaian author, poet, playwright, politician, and academic. She was Secretary for Education in Ghana from 1982 to 1983 under Jerry Rawlings's PNDC administration. Her first play, The Dilemma of a Ghost, was published in 1965, making Aidoo the first published female African dramatist. As a novelist, she won the Commonwealth Writers' Prize in 1992 with the novel Changes. In 2000, she established the Mbaasem Foundation in Accra to promote and support the work of African women writers.
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Caroline Elkins
Caroline Elkins is Professor of History and of African and African American Studies at Harvard University, the Thomas Henry Carroll/Ford Foundation Professor at Harvard Business School, Affiliated Professor at Harvard Law School, and the Founding Oppenheimer Director of Harvard's Center for African Studies.
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Linda Tuhiwai Smith
Professor Smith is Pro Vice-Chancellor Maori with responsibilities for Maori development at the University of Waikato as well as Dean of the School of Maori and Pacific Development and a professor of Education and Maori Development.
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Professor Smith has an academic background in education and research and has a long career as an inter-disciplinary scholar. She is well known for her publications, public speaking and research leadership.
Her 1998 book Decolonising Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples has become a seminal text in indigenous studies. Her other publications canvass a wide range of academic disciplines.
She has worked with a number of Maori scholars most notably her husband Professor Graham Hingangaroa Smith. Professor Smit -
Edward W. Said
(Arabic Profile إدوارد سعيد)
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Edward Wadie Said was a professor of literature at Columbia University, a public intellectual, and a founder of the academic field of postcolonial studies. A Palestinian American born in Mandatory Palestine, he was a citizen of the United States by way of his father, a U.S. Army veteran.
Educated in the Western canon, at British and American schools, Said applied his education and bi-cultural perspective to illuminating the gaps of cultural and political understanding between the Western world and the Eastern world, especially about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in the Middle East; his principal influences were Antonio Gramsci, Frantz Fanon, Aimé Césaire, Michel Foucault, and Theodor Adorno.
As a cultural criti -
Shelagh Delaney
A British playwright, best known for her debut work, A Taste of Honey.
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Chandra Talpade Mohanty
Chandra Talpade Mohanty (born 1955) is a prominent postcolonial and transnational feminist theorist.
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She became well-known after the publication of her influential essay, "Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses" in 1986. In this essay, Mohanty critiques the political project of Western feminism in its discursive construction of the category of the "Third World woman" as a hegemonic entity. Mohanty states that Western feminisms have tended to gloss over the differences between Southern women, but that the experience of oppression is incredibly diverse, and contingent on geography, history, and culture.
In 2003, Chandra Mohanty released her book, "Feminism Without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity". I -
Stefanie Stahl
Stefanie Stahl ist es gelungen, sich im Dschungel der psychologischen Ratgeber Literatur einen Namen zu machen. Sie begeistert durch ihren unterhaltsamen und verständlichen Stil und die vielen Aha-Erlebnisse, die sie ihren Lesern und Leserinnen vermittelt. Ihr Buch "Jein! Bindungsängste erkennen und bewältigen" wird nicht nur von Laien mit Begeisterung aufgenommen, sondern gilt auch in Fachkreisen als Standardwerk.
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Stefanie Stahl, Jahrgang 63, ist in Hamburg geboren und aufgewachsen und hat an der Universität Trier Psychologie studiert. Sie arbeitet als Psychotherapeutin, psychologische Sachverständige und Buchautorin in freier Praxis in Trier. Zudem hält sie im deutschsprachigen Raum Seminare zum Thema Bindungsangst. Weitere Informationen f -
Attia Hosain
Attia Hosain (1913–1998) was a writer, feminist and broadcaster. She was born in 1913 in Lucknow in a taluqdar background. She moved to Britain in 1947.
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Attia was born in Lucknow and went to the local La Martiniere Girls' College. She was the daughter of Sheikh Shahid Husain Kidwai and Nisar Fatima, the daughter of Syed Maqbool Hussain Alvi of Kakori.
She studied at Isabella Thoburn College from the age of fifteen and Lucknow University.
She moved to Britain in 1947 and became a broadcaster for the BBC, hosting a popular women's radio programme.
Attia's niece is the Pakistani author Muneeza Shamsie and her great-niece is author Kamila Shamsie. British television director Waris Hussein is her son and film producer Shama Habibullah is her daughte -
Leonid Tsypkin
Tsypkin was born in Minsk, Soviet Union (now the capital of Belarus), to Russian-Jewish parents, both of whom were medical specialists.
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At the start of Stalin's Great Terror, in 1934, Tsypkin's father, Boris, an orthopaedic surgeon, was arrested on trumped-up charges, but was later released after a suicide attempt in which he broke his back.
Two of Boris Tsypkin's sisters and a brother were also arrested, and were murdered by Stalin's NKVD.
When the war was over Leonid returned with his parents to Minsk, where Leonid graduated from medical school in 1947; despite Stalin's policies of anti-Semitism, Tsypkin became a noted researcher in polio and cancer, and published more than 100 papers in scientific journals in Russia and abroad. While practi -
James Forman Jr.
James Forman Jr. is one of the nation’s leading authorities on race, education, and the criminal justice system, and a tireless advocate for young people who others have written off.
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Forman attended Yale Law School, and after he graduated, worked as a law clerk for Judge William Norris of the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals and Justice Sandra Day O’Connor of the U.S. Supreme Court. After clerking, he took a job at the Public Defender Service in Washington, D.C., where for six years he represented juveniles and adults in felony and misdemeanor cases.
Forman loved being a public defender, but he quickly became frustrated with the lack of education and job training opportunities for his clients. So in 1997, along with David Domenici, he started the -
Olive Schreiner
Olive Schreiner (24 March 1855 - December 11, 1920), was a South African author, pacifist and political activist. She is best known for her novel The Story of an African Farm, which has been acclaimed for the manner it tackled the issues of its day, ranging from agnosticism to the treatment of women.
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From Wikipedia:
Olive Emilie Albertina Schreiner (1855-1920) was named after her three older brothers, Oliver (1848-1854), Albert (1843-1843) and Emile (1852-1852), who died before she was born. She was the ninth of twelve children born to a missionary couple, Gottlob Schreiner and Rebecca Lyndall at the Wesleyan Missionary Society station at Wittebergen in the Eastern Cape, near Herschel in South Africa. Her childhood was a harsh one: her father -
Amos Tutuola
Amos Tutuola (20 June 1920 – 8 June 1997) was a Nigerian writer famous for his books based in part on Yoruba folk-tales.
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Despite his short formal education, Tutuola wrote his novels in English. His writing's grammar often relies more on Yoruba orality than on standard English. -
John Bowe
Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.
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John Bowe (born 1964) has contributed to The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, GQ, The American Prospect, National Public Radios This American Life, McSweeneys, and others. He is the co-editor of Gig: Americans Talk About Their Jobs, one of Harvard Business Reviews best books of 2000, and co-screenwriter of the film Basquiat. In 2004, he received the J. Anthony Lukas Work-in-Progress Award, the Sydney Hillman Award for journalists, writers, and public figures who pursue social justice and public policy for the common good, and the Richard J. Margolis Award, dedicated to journalism that combines social concern and humor. -
Nuruddin Farah
Nuruddin Farah (Somali: Nuuradiin Faarax, Arabic: نور الدين فرح) is a prominent Somali novelist. Farah has garnered acclaim as one of the greatest contemporary writers in the world, his prose having earned him accolades including the Premio Cavour in Italy, the Kurt Tucholsky Prize in Sweden, the Lettre Ulysses Award in Berlin, and in 1998, the prestigious Neustadt International Prize for Literature. In the same year, the French edition of his novel Gifts won the St Malo Literature Festival's prize. In addition, Farah is a perennial nominee for the Nobel Prize in Literature.
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David G. Maillu
David Maillu was born in colonial Kenya on 19 October 1939. He went to school at age 12, at a Salvation Army School. After four years, he sat for a national colonial education examination, called Common Entrance Examination after which he joined Intermediate School whereby we sat for the Kenya African Primary Education (KAPE). There would be another examination after two years, called Kenya Junior Secondary Education, then finally the East Africa Cambridge School Certificate examination (The O-Level).
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He went to a technical school to Painting and Decorating, which took 3 years. He also enrolled for the British Tutorial College, to study for the High School education. Right from his Intermediate and Technical Schools, he developed passion in -
Elechi Amadi
Elechi Amadi was born in Aluu (near Port Harcourt), in the Delta region of Eastern Nigeria, into an Ibo family, representing a minority nation (tribe), the Ikwere. He studied at the Government College in Umuahia, and like other major Nigerian writers, he was educated at the University College of Ibadan. Its legendary English department and the student magazine The Horn encouraged a number of aspiring writers, including Wole Soyinka (b. 1934), Christopher Okigbo (1932-67), John Pepper Clark (b. 1935), and Cole Omotso. Amadi, however, studied natural sciences. His native language was Ekwerri but he published his writings in English. In 1957 he married Dorah Ohale; they had eight children.
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Amadi received his B. Sc. in physics and mathematic in -
Marjorie Oludhe Macgoye
Marjorie Oludhe Macgoye (1928 – 30 November 2015) was an English/Kenyan novelist, essayist and poet.
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Born Marjorie King in 1928 in Southampton, England, and died on 1st December 2015 in Kenya[.] Marjorie travelled to Kenya to work as a missionary in 1954. She worked at the S.J. Moore Bookshop on Government Road, now Moi Avenue in Nairobi, for some years. There she organised readings which were attended by, among others, Okot P'Bitek, the author of Song of Lawino, and Jonathan Kariara, a Kenyan poet. She met Macgoye, a medical doctor, and the two were married in 1960. In 1971, an anthology entitled Poems from East Africa included the acclaimed poem "A Freedom Song". Her 1986 novel Coming to Birth won the Sinclair Prize and has been used as a -
David Cook
Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.
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David Cook was a British literary critic and editor.
He earned a degree in English literature from the University of London and a MA in 1956. He taught at the University of Southampton and was a lecturer at Makerere University and was an important figure for the literature in East Africa. -
Paul B. Vitta
Paul Vitta was born in Tanzania. He received his PhD in physics from Emory University and was a professor of physics at the University of Dar es Salaam. Later he worked for the African Regional Center for Technology in Senegal. Then he moved to the International Development Research Center in Canada. Before he retired, he was Director of UNESCO's Regional Office for Science and Technology in Africa.
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Tom Chaffin
Historian Tom Chaffin is the author, most recently, of “Odyssey: Young Charles Darwin, The Beagle, and The Voyage that Changed the World" (Feb. 2022, Pegasus). The work, focused on the naturalist's five years of global travel aboard HMS Beagle, chronicles the the formative experiences of his youth.
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Chaffin’s earlier books include “Revolutionary Brothers: Thomas Jefferson, the Marquis de Lafayette, and the Friendship that Helped Forge Two Nations," "Pathfinder: John Charles Frémont and the Course of American Empire," "Sea of Gray: The Around-The-World Odyssey of the Confederate Raider Shenandoah," and "Giant’s Causeway: Frederick Douglass’s Irish Odyssey and the Making of an American Visionary."
The author was was born and grew up in Atlanta a -
Sarah Howe
Sarah Howe is a British poet, academic and editor. Born in Hong Kong to an English father and Chinese mother, she moved to England as a child. Her poetry is precisely painted and aesthetically striking, often grappling with, and delighting in, problems of cultural identity and representation. Like Kei Miller’s explorations of hybridity and cross-cultural identities, Howe’s poetry is inventive, erudite and highly playful, engaging the reader with its passion for language’s intrigues and inadequacies. Howe’s first book Loop of Jade (Chatto & Windus) was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for best first collection in 2015.
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Sarah Howe studied for her BA, MPhil and PhD at the University of Cambridge, also spending a year as a Kennedy Scholar at Ha -
Djibril Tamsir Niane
Djibril Tamsir Niane (born 9 January 1932) is a historian, playwright, and short story writer, born in Conakry, Guinea.
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His secondary education was in Senegal and his degree from the University of Bordeaux. He is an honorary professor of Howard University and the University of Tokyo. He is noted for introducing the Epic of Sundiata, about Sundiata Keita (ca 1217-1255), founder of the Mali Empire, to the Western world in 1960 by translating the story told to him by Djeli Mamoudou Kouyate, a griot or traditional oral historian. He also edited Volume IV —Africa from the Twelfth to the Sixteenth Century— of the UNESCO General History of Africa and did other UNESCO projects. He was the father of model Katoucha Niane, (1960–2008).
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Oyèrónkẹ́ Oyěwùmí
Oyèrónkẹ́ Oyěwùmí is a Nigerian gender scholar and full professor of sociology at Stony Brook University. She acquired her bachelor's degree at the University of Ibadan in Ibadan, Nigeria and went on to pursue her graduate degree in Sociology at the University of California, Berkeley Her 1997 monograph, The Invention of Women: Making an African Sense of Western Gender Discourses, offers a postcolonial feminist critique of Western dominance in African studies.
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Okwiri Oduor
Okwiri Oduor (born 1988/1989) is a Kenyan writer, who won the 2014 Caine Prize with her short story "My Father's Head". In April 2014 she was named on the Hay Festival's Africa39 list of 39 Sub-Saharan African writers aged under 40 with potential and talent to define trends in African literature, with her story "Rag Doll" being included in the subsequent anthology edited by Ellah Allfrey, Africa39: New Writing from Africa South of the Sahara.
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Yewande Omotoso
YEWANDE OMOTOSO was born in Barbados and grew up in Nigeria, moving to South Africa with her family in 1992. Trained as an Architect she is the author of Bom Boy (Modjaji Books, 2011) which won the South African Literary Award for First-Time Published Author and was shortlisted for the South African Sunday Times Fiction Prize. In 2013 she was a finalist in the the inaugural, pan-African Etisalat Fiction Prize. Her second novel The Woman Next Door (Chatto and Windus, 2016) was longlisted for the Bailey's Women Prize and shortlisted for the Dublin Literary Award. An Unusual Grief (Cassava Republic, 2022) is Omotoso's third novel. Omotoso works as a Storytelling Advisor with Greenpeace International and lives in Johannesburg.
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Carl Dennis
Librarian Note: There is more than one author by this name in the Goodreads data base.
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Susan Bassnett
Susan Bassnett is Professor of Comparative Literature in the Centre for Translation and Comparative Cultural Studies at the University of Warwick.
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See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Susan_B... -
Okot p'Bitek
Okot p'Bitek (7 June 1931 – 20 July 1982) was a Ugandan poet, who achieved wide international recognition for Song of Lawino, a long poem dealing with the tribulations of a rural African wife whose husband has taken up urban life and wishes everything to be westernised.
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Thomas Mofolo
Thomas Mokopu Mofolo (22 December 1876 – 8 September 1948) is considered to be the greatest Basotho author. He wrote mostly in the Sesotho language, but his most popular book, Chaka, has been translated into English and other languages.
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Bharath Murthy
Bharath Murthy is a filmmaker and comics author.He studied painting at Faculty of Fine arts ,M.S.University of Baroda, and film direction at Satyajit Ray Film and Television Institute,kolkata.
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Calixthe Beyala
Calixthe Beyala (born 1961) is a Cameroonian-born French writer who writes in French.
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She grew up in Douala with her sister. In 1978, she left Cameroon for France. She married, and has two children.
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Calixthe Beyala est née à Douala au Cameroun. Sixième d'une famille de douze enfants, elle a été marquée par l'extrême pauvreté de son milieu. Calixthe Beyala a passé son enfance séparée de son père et de sa mère qui sont originaires de la région de Yaoundé. D'un tempérament solitaire, dit-elle, elle a grandi seule avec une soeur de quatre ans son aînée qui l'a prise en charge et l'a envoyée à l'école. Calixthe Beyala a été à l'école principale du camp Nboppi à Douala. Ensuite, elle a fréquenté successivement le lycée des rapides à -
Kariuki Kimuyu
Kariuki Kimuyu is a writer based in Nairobi, where he is currently working on his fifth book. Kesho & Malkia. When he is not whacking away at the keyboard, you can find him taking long walks or stopping to buy anything consumable by the roadside.
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Binyavanga Wainaina
Binyavanga Wainaina was a short story writer, essayist, and journalist.
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He was the founding editor of Kwani?, a leading African literary magazine based in Kenya, and he directed the Chinua Achebe Center for African Writers and Artists at Bard College.
He won the 2002 Caine Prize for African Writing, and wrote for many journals, including Vanity Fair, National Geographic, One Story, Tin House, Virginia Quarterly Review, Harper's, Granta, the Sunday Times, and the New York Times. -
Peter Abrahams
Peter Abrahams was a South African-born Jamaican novelist, journalist and political commentator.
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Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name. -
G.V. Desani
Govindas Vishnoodas Desani or G. V. Desani, (1909–2000) was a Kenyan-born, British-educated Indian writer and Buddhist philosopher. The son of a merchant, he began his career as a journalist, and achieved fame with the cult novel All About H. Hatterr (1948), considered one of the finest examples of literature in English and a novel that compares favourably with Joyce's Ulysses. He was for a time a university professor in America, and spent many years engaged in meditation at various monasteries. A second volume, Hali and Collected Stories, was published in 1991.
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Emmanuel Dongala
Emmanuel Dongala born July 14, 1941 is a Congolese Chemist ,short story writer, novelist and playwright, schooled in Brazzaville , and studied in the United States where he earned a BA in Chemistry from Oberlin College and an MA from Rutgers University . He then left the United States for France , where he was awarded a PhD in Organic Chemistry. Upon his return to the Congo he worked as a teacher and dean until 1998, when he was forced to leave because of the civil war. Helped by his friend, the writer Philip Roth, Dongala now lives in the United States , where he teaches at Bard College and holds the Richard B. Fisher Chair in Natural Sciences.
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Dongala, who writes in French and whose books have been translated into a dozen languages, has pu -
Binwell Sinyangwe
Binwell Sinyangwe (born 1956) is a Zambian novelist writing in English.
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He studied industrial economics in Bucharest. -
Jeff Young
Jeff Young is a writer for screen, stage and radio. A former senior lecturer in Creative Writing at Liverpool John Moores University, Jeff lives in Liverpool.
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Dilman Dila
Dilman Dila is a Ugandan writer and film maker.
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In 2014, he was longlisted for the BBC Radio Playwriting Competition, and in 2013, he was shortlisted for the prestigious Commonwealth Short Story Prize and long listed for the Short Story Day Africa prize.
He was nominated for the 2008 Million Writers Awards for his short story, Homecoming.
He first appeared in print in The Sunday Vision in 2001. His works have since featured in several literary magazines and anthologies. His most recent works include the sci-fi, Lights on Water, published in The Short Anthology, the novelette, The Terminal Move, and the romance novella, Cranes Crest at Sunset, which are available on Amazon.
His films include the masterpiece, What Happened in Room 13 (2007), -
Joaquim Arena
Joaquim Arena was born on the island of São Vicente in Cape Verde in 1964 and moved with his family to Portugal aged 6. After studying Law, he worked as a journalist, first in Portugal, then in Cape Verde. He has written four books: the novella Um Farol no Deserto [A Lighthouse in the Desert] (2000), the novels A Verdade de Chindo Luz [The Truth About Chindo Luz] (2006) and Para Onde Voam as Tartarugas [Where Turtles Fly] (2010) and the non-fiction Debaixo da Nossa Pele – Uma Viagem [Under Our Skin – A Journey] (2017). He is currently the Culture and Communications Advisor to the President of Cape Verde.
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José Murilo de Carvalho
José Murilo de Carvalho é um cientista político e historiador brasileiro, membro desde 2005 da Academia Brasileira de Letras. Junto com o jurista e professor Celso Lafer, é o único historiador brasileiro a ser membro dessa Academia e também da Academia Brasileira de Ciências.
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Professor da Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais e do IUPERJ por vinte anos, é também professor titular de História do Brasil no Departamento de História do Instituto de Filosofia e Ciências Sociais da Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro.
José Murilo de Carvalho é o sexto ocupante da Cadeira 5 da Academia Brasileira de Letras, eleito em 11 de março de 2004, na sucessão de Rachel de Queiroz. Foi recepcionado em 10 de setembro de 2004 pelo acadêmico Affonso Arinos de M -
Cezar Paul-Badescu
Cezar Paul-Badescu (born 1968, in Bucharest, Romania) graduated from Bucharest University with a Degree in Literature in 1996 and was awarded an MA in the Theory of Literature and Comparative Literature by the same institution in 1995. Since 1996, he has worked as an editor for Dilema magazine (in the meantime renamed Dilema Veche). In 1997, he edited an issue of the magazine that questioned the mythologies surrounding Romania’s national poet, Mihai Eminescu. The issue provoked irate reactions in the Romanian press and led to statements being made in Romania’s Parliament. Cezar Paul-Badescu was threatened with a “firing squad” in nationalist publications. In 1999, he edited an anthology named The Eminescu Case (Paralela 45 Publishing House,
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Christopher Okigbo
Christopher Ifekandu Okigbo (16 August 1932 – 1967) was a Nigerian poet, teacher, and librarian, who died fighting for the independence of Biafra. He is today widely acknowledged as an outstanding postcolonial English-language African poet and one of the major modernist writers of the 20th century.
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ibn Rushd
Arabic version: ابن رشد
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Commentaries of well known Arab philosopher, jurist, and physician Averroës or Averrhoës, also ibn Rushd, of Spain on Aristotle exerted a strong influence on medieval Christian theology.
Abu'l-Walid Ibn Rushd, better as Averroes, stands as a towering figure in the history of Islamic as that of west European thought. In the Islamic world, he played a decisive role in the defense of Greeks against the onslaughts of the Ash'arite (Mutakallimun), led by Abu Hamid al-Ghazali, and in the rehabilitation.
A common theme throughout his writings properly understood religion with no incompatibility. His contributions took many forms, ranging from his detailed, his defense against the attacks of those who condemned it as contrary