Latest news with #ChimamandaNgoziAdichie
BBC News
10 hours ago
- Entertainment
- BBC News
The 12 best books of 2025 so far
From multigenerational family sagas to speculative dystopias – the very best fiction of the year so far. Dream Count by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie More than 10 years have passed since Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's acclaimed Americanah, so the arrival of her new novel is a big literary moment. Dream Count is built around interconnecting storylines and the friendship of three Nigerian women whose lives have not worked out as they had envisioned. Recounting the characters' hopes and struggles, the novel interweaves childhood and early-adult memories with the women's current lives. It is "worth the wait," says The Observer, and is like "four novels for the price of one, each of them powered by the simple but evergreen thrill of time spent in the company of flesh and blood characters lavishly imagined in the round." The book explores "big themes" according to the New Statesman – masculinity, race, colonialism, power. "A complex, multi-layered beauty of a book. Extraordinary. " (LB) We Do Not Part by Han Kang We Do Not Part was released in English translation in February, although it was originally published in Han Kang's native South Korea in 2021, and therefore helped contribute to the body of work that won her the 2024 Nobel Prize for Literature. Drawing comparisons with her Booker Prize-winning bestseller, The Vegetarian, and similarly blurring the lines between dreams and reality, We Do Not Part explores the relationship between two women, Kyungha and Inseon, while uncovering a violent and forgotten chapter in Korean history. The LA Times calls We Do Not Part: "exquisite and profoundly disquieting". It writes of Han Kang: "her singular ability to find connections between body and soul and to experiment with form and style, are what makes her one of the world's most important writers." (RL) Stag Dance by Torrey Peters The follow-up to Torrey Peters' critically acclaimed debut Detransition, Baby is a collection of tales, each with an intriguing premise, ranging in genre from romantic to dystopian to historical. In The Masker, a young party-goer on a hedonistic Las Vegas weekend must choose between two guides, a mystery man or a veteran trans woman; in The Chaser an illicit boarding-school romance surfaces; in the titular Stag Dance a group of lumberjacks in the 19th Century, working deep in the forest, plan a winter dance – with some of the men volunteering to attend as women. The Chicago Review of Books compares the collection favourably to Peters' debut, describing the stories as "seductive, dazzling, and history-making once again". The Guardian is similarly effusive: "The pieces are meticulously crafted; especially Stag Dance, with its deft pacing and almost operatic denouement." The writing is "mischievous rather than sanctimonious", it adds, and "it is clear she is having a great deal of fun". (LB) Theft by Abdulrazak Gurnah "A quietly powerful demonstration of storytelling mastery" writes The Observer of Theft, the 11th novel from the 2021 winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature. Set against the backdrop of postcolonial East Africa, situated between Zanzibar and Dar-Es Salaam, Tanzania, Theft is a coming-of-age tale exploring the inner lives of three teenagers – Karim, Badar and Fauzia – who bond despite growing up in very different circumstances. "A tightly focussed, beautifully controlled examination of friendship and betrayal," writes The Economist, while The Wall Street Journal praises Gurnah's "restraint", adding: "he builds his fictional worlds cumulatively, giving equal regard to the 'many things' that make up experience. There are no single truths in this steady, mature novel, which may be why it feels so true as a whole." (RL) Universality by Natasha Brown Natasha Brown's celebrated 2021 debut, Assembly, was a short, precise novel and a dissection of class and race that was shortlisted for several awards. In her follow-up she examines how identity politics is cynically deployed, satirising on the way cancel culture and the worlds of publishing and journalism. The story begins with a dubious article attempting to unravel a mystery involving an illegal rave, a missing gold bar and a banker. Soon the novel moves on to the fallout from the exposé, and the knock-on effect of the people affected by the crime. "It's all enormous, nasty fun," says the Literary Review. "Infidelity, exploitation and hatred abound… Brown's main purpose is to satirise and skewer the socio-economic forces that have shaped life in the UK since the late 2010s." Universality is "very funny", says the New Statesman. "Brown is an astute political observer, easily dismembering cancel culture and our media circus." (LB) The Names by Florence Knapp Knapp's debut novel begins in 1987, as Cora Atkin is pondering three different names for her newborn baby boy: Gordon, after her abusive doctor husband; Bear, the choice of her older daughter, Maia; or her preference, Julian. With the premise that each potential name offers a unique destiny, the narrative splits therein, revisiting its characters at seven-year intervals in a manner that recalls Sliding Doors. And despite its dark subject matter, critics have praised The Names for its upbeat, uplifting effect. The Standard writes: "Knapp's deftly woven story is at once a big, bold experiment, a playful exercise in nominative determinism, a meditation on fate and a coming-of-age story", while The Washington Post calls the novel: "a profound, deeply compassionate examination of domestic abuse," which is "startlingly joyful and paced like a thriller". (RL) The Emperor of Gladness by Ocean Vuong Ocean Vuong's second novel The Emperor of Gladness: "may well be the first millennial Great American Novel", according to Art Review. It is: "perfectly tuned", and "as wide in scope as it is quiet and tender". It tells the story of Hai, a young gay man who has run away from home, and his coming of age in the rural northeast in Obama-era US. It also explores his friendship with Grazina, an elderly Lithuanian widow with dementia. Hai finds work in a fast-dining chain, and bonds with his mixed bag of new colleagues, who discover connection in their past hardships. The Emperor of Gladness is: "a fine-grained social panorama driven by the developing camaraderie of an ensemble cast bonded in precariousness and pain," says The Observer. (LB) Eden's Shore by Oisín Fagan "A tremendous romp of a tale", this brutal seafaring epic's protagonist is Angel Kelly, a late-18th-Century slaver headed to Brazil with the goal to found a utopian community; chaos ensues and he washes up on the shores of an unnamed Spanish colony. With grisly attention to detail, Fagan spares little in describing the violence of the slave trade with the blackest of humour and an experimental approach to form. "Eden's Shore is a rich and beautifully told tale of toxic adventurism" writes the TLS, while the Financial Times writes: "Alexander's capacious performance is made to encompass the visceral, physical experiences of the journey – disease, sex, seasickness, violence – and its more cerebral aspects, in which the politics, philosophy and idealistic utopianism of the day find expression." (RL) Dream State by Eric Puchner A multi-generational family saga, Dream State explores themes of love, betrayal, and the effects across generations of the choices we make. Beginning in 2004, the story is set in a rapidly warming, fictionalised version of Montana's Flathead Valley, with the lake at the valley's centre the nucleus of the story. Dream State traverses five decades, and: "gradually coalesces into a family history that feels monumental", says Lit Hub. The effect is: "hypnotically telescopic, a vision of people we come to know across decades. Puchner's manipulation of time is among his novel's most magical elements." His narration: "can slip from funny to harrowing as fast as young man can ski to his death". Oprah Winfrey selected Dream State as a book club pick, describing Puchner as a "master storyteller" and the book as: "an exquisite examination of the most important relationships we have in our lives". (LB) The Dream Hotel by Laila Lalami Longlisted for the 2025 Women's Prize for Fiction, Lalami's fifth novel is a nightmarish speculative tale about the terrifying reaches of technology and surveillance. As Sara returns to LAX airport from a conference, she is stopped by the Risk Assessment Administration, who determine – using data from her dreams – that she is about to harm her husband. She's transferred to a retention centre to be monitored for 21 days, where she finds – along with other dreamers – that her journey back to her family becomes more and more out of reach. "A scarily credible vision," The Spectator writes of The Dream Hotel, continuing that it: "taps deftly into the terrors of our times", while The Economist calls it: "a riveting tale of the risks of surrendering privacy for convenience". (RL) Confessions by Catherine Airey The debut from new voice Catherine Airey has been widely praised. Confessions traces the trajectories of three generations of women as they experience the weight of the past in all its complexity. In 2001, newly orphaned by 9/11, New Yorker Cora Brady, on the cusp of adulthood, is offered a new life in Ireland – where her parents grew up – by an estranged aunt. "The narrative zips along with the crackling intelligence of Donna Tartt, full of twists and zips, and genuine surprises," says the Irish Independent. "Confessions is an astonishing and remarkable novel and truly deserving of all the accolades coming its way." The Guardian says: "The book is a saga: its serious pleasures are its expansiveness and range, and Airey's rare, particular instinct for scenes or worlds that are interesting to be with, from 1970s New York art kids to early female gamers." Confessions, it concludes, is "a cool, bold image of female pain and liberation". (LB) Flesh by David Szalay Szalay's most celebrated work, All That Man Is, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2016, explored 21st-Century manhood through the lives of nine different men. One man's journey from teen to adulthood is the subject of Flesh. We first meet 15-year-old István in Hungary where he lives with his mother, then as he begins a relationship with a much older woman that has tragic consequences, joins the army and then rises to the top of London society. With Flesh, Szalay employs an even more pared-down version of his spare, minimalist prose to explore the meaning of a life. "Flesh is about more than just the things that go unsaid…" writes the Guardian, "it is also about what is fundamentally unsayable, the ineffable things that sit at the centre of every life, hovering beyond the reach of language." The Observer praises Flesh's: "searing insight into the way we live now" calling it: "a masterpiece". (RL) -- For more Culture stories from the BBC, follow us on Facebook, X and Instagram.
Scotsman
4 days ago
- Entertainment
- Scotsman
Edinburgh International Book Festival 2025: Fiction Highlights
Sign up to our Arts and Culture newsletter, get the latest news and reviews from our specialist arts writers Sign up Thank you for signing up! Did you know with a Digital Subscription to The Scotsman, you can get unlimited access to the website including our premium content, as well as benefiting from fewer ads, loyalty rewards and much more. Learn More Sorry, there seem to be some issues. Please try again later. Submitting... It's been 12 long years since Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie last published a novel, but the reviews for Dream Count are so glowing that it seems it's been worth the wait. One of the stars of festival's Front List, she will be appearing (19 August) on stage at the McEwan Hall, when an appropriately large audience will be able to find out why, according to one review, 'nothing less than the whole female experience' is within the scope of her new book. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie PIC:Ian McEwan (no relation) is a welcome repeat visitor to the festival, and has in the past discussed the difficulty of novelists tackling such a diffuse topic as climate change. On the festival's last day (24 August) Kirsty Wark may be able to draw him out on why he has returned to the subject in his next novel, What We Can Know, out in September. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad Ian McEwan PIC: Stuartfor BFI Also on the McEwan Hall stage, Maggie O'Farrell (15 August) will be celebrating the 25th anniversary of publishing her debut novel, After You'd Gone. Festival director Jenny Niven will chair the event – and might even get some of the skinny on the filming of Hamnet by Oscar-winning director Chloe Zhao, starring Paul Mescal as Shakespeare and Jessie Buckley as Anne Hathaway. Maggie O'Farrell PIC: Dasha Tenditna Back in the Futures Institute, Abdulrazak Gurnah will be discussing Theft, his first novel since winning the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2021 (10 August), while Australia's Michelle de Kretser – winner of her country's Stella award only a fortnight ago for Theory and Practice, her genre-bending 'fictional memoir' – makes her festival debut (16 August). The following day, our own genre-bender Ali Smith will be discussing her dystopian book Gliff, which de Krester herself has hailed as 'an irresistible invitation to rethink and reword our way to a truly brave new world'. What else? If you're looking for the best of Irish fiction, check out Eimear McBride (21 August) and Colum McCann (18 August); for French, see if Laurent Binet (19 August) can interest you in his epistolary detective story featuring half the artists in the Renaissance; work out if Daniel Kehlmann (9 August) deserves his reputation as the leading German novelist of his generation or why Javier Cercas (19 August) – highly regarded by our own Allan Massie – has long enjoyed similar status in Spain. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad I've only room to cram in a few more favourites, but it's impossible to leave out two great double-bills – Alan Hollinghurst appearing alongside Tash Aw (9 August) and Natasha Brown with Hari Kunzru (22 August) or last year's Man Booker winner Samantha Harvey (14 August). The festival's first Thursday is probably the best day to see Scottish writers, as Ewan Morrison, Doug Johnstone, Chris Brookmyre and Denise Mina are all there to talk about their latest novels (Brookmyre's 30th, Mina's 20th) at separate events.
CBC
29-05-2025
- Health
- CBC
Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, Kenyan author and dissident who became a giant of modern literature, dead at 87
Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, the revered Kenyan man of letters and voice of dissent who in dozens of fiction and nonfiction books traced his country's history from British imperialism to home-ruled tyranny and challenged not only the stories told but the language used to tell them, died on Wednesday (May 28) at 87. U.S. publisher The New Press confirmed the death to The Associated Press. Ngũgĩ's son said he died in Georgia. Further details were not immediately available, though Ngũgĩ was receiving kidney dialysis treatments. Whether through novels such as The Wizard of the Crow and Petals of Blood, memoirs such as Birth of a Dream Weaver or the landmark critique Decolonizing the Mind, Ngũgĩ embodied the very heights of the artist's calling — as a truth teller and explorer of myth, as a breaker of rules and steward of culture. He was a perennial candidate for the Nobel literature prize and a long-term artist in exile, imprisoned for a year in the 1970s and harassed for decades after. "Resistance is the best way of keeping alive," he told the Guardian in 2018. "It can take even the smallest form of saying no to injustice. If you really think you're right, you stick to your beliefs, and they help you to survive." He was admired worldwide, by authors ranging from John Updike to Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, and by former President Barack Obama, who once praised Ngũgĩ's ability to tell "a compelling story of how the transformative events of history weigh on individual lives and relationships." Ngũgĩ was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2009, was a finalist for a National Book Critics Circle prize in 2012 and, four years later, was the winner of the Pak Kyong-ni Literature Award. Through Ngũgĩ's life, you could dramatize the history of modern Kenya. He grew up on land stolen from his family by British colonists. He was a teenager when the Mau Mau uprising for independence began, in his mid-20s when Britain ceded control in 1963 and in his late 30s when his disillusionment with Kenyan authorities led to his arrest and eventual departure. Beyond his own troubles, his mother was held in solitary confinement by the British, one brother was killed and another brother, deaf and mute, was shot dead when he didn't respond to British soldiers' demands that he stop moving. In a given book, Ngũgĩ might summon anything from ancient fables to contemporary popular culture. His widely translated picture story, The Upright Revolution, updates Kenyan folklore in explaining why humans walk on two legs. The short story The Ghost of Michael Jackson features a priest possessed by the spirit of the late entertainer. Ngũgĩ's tone was often satirical, and he mocked the buffoonery and corruption of government leaders in The Wizard of the Crow, in which aides to the tyrant of fictional Aburiria indulge his most tedious fantasies. "Rumour has it that the Ruler talked nonstop for seven nights and days, seven hours, seven minutes, and seven seconds. By then the ministers had clapped so hard, they felt numb and drowsy," he wrote. "When they became too tired to stand, they started kneeling down before the ruler, until the whole scene looked like an assembly in prayer before the eyes of the Lord. But soon they found that even holding their bodies erect while on their knees was equally tiring, and some assumed the cross-legged posture of the Buddhist." Ngũgĩ sided with the oppressed, but his imagination extended to all sides of his country's divides — a British officer who justifies the suffering he inflicts on local activists, or a young Kenyan idealist willing to lose all for his country's liberation. He parsed the conflicts between oral and written culture, between the city and the village, the educated and the illiterate, the foreigner and the native. One of five children born to the third of his father's four wives. Ngũgĩ grew up north of Nairobi, in Kamiriithu village. He received an elite, colonial education and his name at the time was James Thiong'o. A gifted listener, he once shaped the stories he heard from family members and neighbors into a class assignment about an imagined elder council meeting, so impressing one of his teachers that the work was read before a school assembly. His formal writing career began through an act of invention. While a student at Makerere University College in Uganda, he encountered the editor of a campus magazine and told him he had some stories to contribute, even though he had not yet written a word. "It is a classic case of bluffing oneself into one's destiny," Nigerian author Ben Okri later wrote. "Ngũgĩ wrote a story, it was published." He grew ever bolder. At the African Writers Conference, held in Uganda in 1962, he met one of the authors who had made his work possible, Nigeria's Chinua Achebe, who, following the acclaim of his novel Things Fall Apart, had become an advisory editor to the newly launched African Writer Series publishing imprint. Ngũgĩ approached Achebe and urged him to consider two novels he had completed, Weep Not, Child and The River Between, both of which were released in the next three years. Ngũgĩ was praised as a new talent, but would later say he had not quite found his voice. His real breakthrough came, ironically, in Britain, while he was a graduate student in the mid-1960s at Leeds University. For the first time, he read such Caribbean authors as Derek Walcott and V.S. Naipaul and was especially drawn to the Barbadian novelist George Lamming, who wrote often of colonialism and displacement. "He evoked for me, an unforgettable picture of a peasant revolt in a white-dominated world," Ngũgĩ later wrote. "And suddenly I knew that a novel could be made to speak to me, could, with a compelling urgency, touch cords deep down in me. His world was not as strange to me as that of Fielding, Defoe, Smollett, Jane Austen, George Eliot, Dickens, D.H. Lawrence." By the late 1960s, he had embraced Marxism, dropped his Anglicized first name and broadened his fiction, starting with A Grain of Wheat. Over the following decade, he became increasingly estranged from the reign of Kenyan President Jomo Kenyatta. He had been teaching at Nairobi University since 1967, but resigned at one point in protest of government interference. Upon returning, in 1973, he advocated for a restructuring of the literary curriculum. "Why can't African literature be at the centre so that we can view other cultures in relationship to it?" Ngũgĩ and colleagues Taban Lo Liyong and Awuor Anyumba wrote. In 1977, a play he co-authored with Ngũgĩ wa Mirii, I Will Marry When I Want, was staged in Limuru, using local workers and peasants as actors. Like a novel he published the same year, Petals of Blood, the play attacked the greed and corruption of the Kenyan government. It led to his arrest and imprisonment for a year, before Amnesty International and others helped pressure authorities to release him. "The act of imprisoning democrats, progressive intellectuals, and militant workers reveals many things," he wrote in Wrestling With the Devil, a memoir published in 2018. "It is first an admission by the authorities that they know they have been seen. By signing the detention orders, they acknowledge that the people have seen through their official lies labeled as a new philosophy, their pretensions wrapped in three-piece suits and gold chains, their propaganda packaged as religious truth, their plastic smiles ordered from above." He didn't only rebel against laws and customs. As a child, he had learned his ancestral tongue Gikuyu, only to have the British overseers of his primary school mock anyone speaking it, making them wear a sign around their necks that read "I am stupid" or "I am a donkey." Starting with Devil On the Cross, written on toilet paper while he was in prison, he reclaimed the language of his past. Along with Achebe and others, he had helped shatter the Western monopoly on African stories and reveal to the world how those on the continent saw themselves. But unlike Achebe, he insisted that Africans should express themselves in an African language. In Decolonizing the Mind, published in 1986, Ngũgĩ contended that it was impossible to liberate oneself while using the language of oppressors. "The question is this: we as African writers have always complained about the neo-colonial economic and political relationship to Euro-America," he wrote. "But by our continuing to write in foreign languages, paying homage to them, are we not on the cultural level continuing that neo-colonial slavish and cringing spirit? What is the difference between a politician who says Africa cannot do without imperialism and the writer who says Africa cannot do without European languages?" He would, however, spend much of his latter years in English-speaking countries. Ngũgĩ lived in Britain for much of the 1980s before settling in the U.S. He taught at Yale University, Northwestern University and New York University, and eventually became a professor of English and comparative literature at the University of California, Irvine, where he was founding director of the school's International Center for Writing & Translation. In Irvine, he lived with his second wife, Njeeri wa Ngugi, with whom he had two children. He had several other children from previous relationships. Even after leaving Kenya, Ngũgĩ survived attempts on his life and other forms of violence. Kenyatta's successor, Daniel arap Moi, sent an assassination squad to his hotel while the writer was visiting Zimbabwe in 1986, but local authorities discovered the plot. During a 2004 visit to Kenya, the author was beaten and his wife sexually assaulted. Only in 2015 was he formally welcomed in his home country. "When, in 2015, the current President, Uhuru Kenyatta, received me at the State House, I made up a line. 'Jomo Kenyatta sent me to prison, guest of the state. Daniel arap Moi forced me into exile, enemy of the state. Uhuru Kenyatta received me at the State House,'" Ngũgĩ later told The Penn Review. "Writing is that which I have to do. Storytelling. I see life through stories. Life itself is one big, magical story."
The Independent
28-05-2025
- Health
- The Independent
Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, Kenyan author and dissident who became a giant of modern literature, dies at 87
Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, the revered Kenyan man of letters and voice of dissent who in dozens of fiction and nonfiction books traced his country's history from British imperialism to home-ruled tyranny and challenged not only the stories told but the language used to tell them, died Wednesday at 87. Derek Warker, publicist for Ngũgĩ's U.S. publisher The New Press, confirmed the death to The Associated Press. Further details were not immediately available, though Ngũgĩ was receiving kidney dialysis treatments. Whether through novels such as 'The Wizard of the Crow' and 'Petals of Blood,' memoirs such as 'Birth of a Dream Weaver' or the landmark critique 'Decolonizing the Mind,' Ngũgĩ embodied the very heights of the artist's calling — as a truth teller and explorer of myth, as a breaker of rules and steward of culture. He was a perennial candidate for the Nobel literature prize and a long-term artist in exile, imprisoned for a year in the 1970s and harassed for decades after. 'Resistance is the best way of keeping alive,' he told the Guardian in 2018. 'It can take even the smallest form of saying no to injustice. If you really think you're right, you stick to your beliefs, and they help you to survive.' He was admired worldwide, by authors ranging from John Updike to Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, and by former President Barack Obama, who once praised Ngũgĩ's ability to tell 'a compelling story of how the transformative events of history weigh on individual lives and relationships.' Ngũgĩ was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2009, was a finalist for a National Book Critics Circle prize in 2012 and, four years later, was the winner of the Pak Kyong-ni Literature Award. Through Ngũgĩ's life, you could dramatize the history of modern Kenya. He grew up on land stolen from his family by British colonists. He was a teenager when the Mau Mau uprising for independence began, in his mid-20s when Britain ceded control in 1963 and in his late 30s when his disillusion with Kenyan authorities led to his arrest and eventual departure. Beyond his own troubles, his mother was held in solitary confinement by the British, one brother was killed and another brother, deaf and mute, was shot dead when he didn't respond to British soldiers' demands that he stop moving. In a given book, Ngũgĩ might summon anything from ancient fables to contemporary popular culture. His widely translated picture story, 'The Upright Revolution,' updates Kenyan folklore in explaining why humans walk on two legs. The short story 'The Ghost of Michael Jackson' features a priest possessed by the spirit of the late entertainer. Ngũgĩ's tone was often satirical, and he mocked the buffoonery and corruption of government leaders in 'The Wizard of the Crow,' in which aides to the tyrant of fictional Aburiria indulge his most tedious fantasies. 'Rumor has it that the Ruler talked nonstop for seven nights and days, seven hours, seven minutes, and seven seconds. By then the ministers had clapped so hard, they felt numb and drowsy,' he wrote. 'When they became too tired to stand, they started kneeling down before the ruler, until the whole scene looked like an assembly in prayer before the eyes of the Lord. But soon they found that even holding their bodies erect while on their knees was equally tiring, and some assumed the cross-legged posture of the Buddhist.' Ngũgĩ sided with the oppressed, but his imagination extended to all sides of his country's divides — a British officer who justifies the suffering he inflicts on local activists, or a young Kenyan idealist willing to lose all for his country's liberation. He parsed the conflicts between oral and written culture, between the city and the village, the educated and the illiterate, the foreigner and the native. One of five children born to the third of his father's four wives. Ngũgĩ grew up north of Nairobi, in Kamiriithu village. He received an elite, colonial education and his name at the time was James Thiong'o. A gifted listener, he once shaped the stories he heard from family members and neighbors into a class assignment about an imagined elder council meeting, so impressing one of his teachers that the work was read before a school assembly. His formal writing career began through an act of invention. While a student at Makerere University College in Kampala, Uganda, he encountered the editor of a campus magazine and told him he had some stories to contribute, even though he had not yet written a word. 'It is a classic case of bluffing oneself into one's destiny,' Nigerian author Ben Okri later wrote. 'Ngũgĩ wrote a story, it was published.' He grew ever bolder. At the African Writers Conference, held in Uganda in 1962, he met one of the authors who had made his work possible, Nigeria's Chinua Achebe, who, following the acclaim of his novel 'Things Fall Apart,' had become an advisory editor to the newly launched African Writer Series publishing imprint. Ngũgĩ approached Achebe and urged him to consider two novels he had completed, 'Weep Not, Child' and 'The River Between,' both of which were released in the next three years. Ngũgĩ was praised as a new talent, but would later say he had not quite found his voice. His real breakthrough came, ironically, in Britain, while he was a graduate student in the mid-1960s at Leeds University. For the first time, he read such Caribbean authors as Derek Walcott and V.S. Naipaul and was especially drawn to the Barbadian novelist George Lamming, who wrote often of colonialism and displacement. 'He evoked for me, an unforgettable picture of a peasant revolt in a white-dominated world,' Ngũgĩ later wrote. 'And suddenly I knew that a novel could be made to speak to me, could, with a compelling urgency, touch cords deep down in me. His world was not as strange to me as that of Fielding, Defoe, Smollett, Jane Austen, George Eliot, Dickens, D.H. Lawrence.' By the late 1960s, he had embraced Marxism, dropped his Anglicized first name and broadened his fiction, starting with 'A Grain of Wheat.' Over the following decade, he became increasingly estranged from the reign of Kenyan President Jomo Kenyatta. He had been teaching at Nairobi University since 1967, but resigned at one point in protest of government interference. Upon returning, in 1973, he advocated for a restructuring of the literary curriculum. 'Why can't African literature be at the centre so that we can view other cultures in relationship to it?' Ngũgĩ and colleagues Taban Lo Liyong and Awuor Anyumba wrote. In 1977, a play he co-authored with Ngũgĩ wa Mirii, 'I Will Marry When I Want,' was staged in Limuru, using local workers and peasants as actors. Like a novel he published the same year, 'Petals of Blood,' the play attacked the greed and corruption of the Kenyan government. It led to his arrest and imprisonment for a year, before Amnesty International and others helped pressure authorities to release him. 'The act of imprisoning democrats, progressive intellectuals, and militant workers reveals many things,' he wrote in 'Wrestling With the Devil,' a memoir published in 2018. 'It is first an admission by the authorities that they know they have been seen. By signing the detention orders, they acknowledge that the people have seen through their official lies labeled as a new philosophy, their pretensions wrapped in three-piece suits and gold chains, their propaganda packaged as religious truth, their plastic smiles ordered from above.' He didn't only rebel against laws and customs. As a child, he had learned his ancestral tongue Gikuyu, only to have the British overseers of his primary school mock anyone speaking it, making them wear a sign around their necks that read 'I am stupid' or 'I am a donkey.' Starting with 'Devil On the Cross,' written on toilet paper while he was in prison, he reclaimed the language of his past. Along with Achebe and others, he had helped shatter the Western monopoly on African stories and reveal to the world how those on the continent saw themselves. But unlike Achebe, he insisted that Africans should express themselves in an African language. In 'Decolonizing the Mind,' published in 1986, Ngũgĩ contended that it was impossible to liberate oneself while using the language of oppressors. 'The question is this: we as African writers have always complained about the neo-colonial economic and political relationship to Euro-America,' he wrote. 'But by our continuing to write in foreign languages, paying homage to them, are we not on the cultural level continuing that neo-colonial slavish and cringing spirit? What is the difference between a politician who says Africa cannot do without imperialism and the writer who says Africa cannot do without European languages?' He would, however, spend much of his latter years in English-speaking countries. Ngũgĩ lived in Britain for much of the 1980s before settling in the U.S. He taught at Yale University, Northwestern University and New York University, and eventually became a professor of English and comparative literature at the University of California, Irvine, where he was founding director of the school's International Center for Writing & Translation. In Irvine, he lived with his second wife, Njeeri wa Ngugi, with whom he had two children. He had several other children from previous relationships. Even after leaving Kenya, Ngũgĩ survived attempts on his life and other forms of violence. Kenyatta's successor, Daniel arap Moi, sent an assassination squad to his hotel while the writer was visiting Zimbabwe in 1986, but local authorities discovered the plot. During a 2004 visit to Kenya, the author was beaten and his wife sexually assaulted. Only in 2015 was he formally welcomed in his home country. 'When, in 2015, the current President, Uhuru Kenyatta, received me at the State House, I made up a line. 'Jomo Kenyatta sent me to prison, guest of the state. Daniel arap Moi forced me into exile, enemy of the state. Uhuru Kenyatta received me at the State House,'' Ngũgĩ later told The Penn Review. 'Writing is that which I have to do. Storytelling. I see life through stories. Life itself is one big, magical story.'
Associated Press
28-05-2025
- General
- Associated Press
Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, Kenyan author and dissident who became a giant of modern literature, dies at 87
NEW YORK (AP) — Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, the revered Kenyan man of letters and voice of dissent who in dozens of fiction and nonfiction books traced his country's history from British imperialism to home-ruled tyranny and challenged not only the stories told but the language used to tell them, has died at 87. Derek Warker, publicist for Ngũgĩ's U.S. publisher The New Press, confirmed the death to The Associated Press on Wednesday. Further details were not immediately available. Whether through novels such as 'The Wizard of the Crow' and 'Petals of Blood,' memoirs such as 'Birth of a Dream Weaver' or the landmark critique 'Decolonizing the Mind,' Ngũgĩ embodied the very heights of the artist's calling — as a truth teller and explorer of myth, as a breaker of rules and steward of culture. He was a perennial candidate for the Nobel literature prize and a long-term artist in exile, imprisoned for a year in the 1970s and harassed for decades after. 'Resistance is the best way of keeping alive,' he told the Guardian in 2018. 'It can take even the smallest form of saying no to injustice. If you really think you're right, you stick to your beliefs, and they help you to survive.' He was admired worldwide, by authors ranging from John Updike to Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, and by former President Barack Obama, who once praised Ngũgĩ's ability to tell 'a compelling story of how the transformative events of history weigh on individual lives and relationships.' Ngũgĩ was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2009, was a finalist for a National Book Critics Circle prize in 2012 and, four years later, was the winner of the Pak Kyong-ni Literature Award. Through Ngũgĩ's life, you could dramatize the history of modern Kenya. He grew up on land stolen from his family by British colonists. He was a teenager when the Mau Mau uprising for independence began, in his mid-20s when Britain ceded control in 1963 and in his late 30s when his disillusion with Kenyan authorities led to his arrest and eventual departure. Beyond his own troubles, his mother was held in solitary confinement by the British, one brother was killed and another brother, deaf and mute, was shot dead when he didn't respond to British soldiers' demands that he stop moving. In a given book, Ngũgĩ might summon anything from ancient fables to contemporary popular culture. His widely translated picture story, 'The Upright Revolution,' updates Kenyan folklore in explaining why humans walk on two legs. The short story 'The Ghost of Michael Jackson' features a priest possessed by the spirit of the late entertainer. Ngũgĩ's tone was often satirical, and he mocked the buffoonery and corruption of government leaders in 'The Wizard of the Crow,' in which aides to the tyrant of fictional Aburiria indulge his most tedious fantasies. 'Rumor has it that the Ruler talked nonstop for seven nights and days, seven hours, seven minutes, and seven seconds. By then the ministers had clapped so hard, they felt numb and drowsy,' he wrote. 'When they became too tired to stand, they started kneeling down before the ruler, until the whole scene looked like an assembly in prayer before the eyes of the Lord. But soon they found that even holding their bodies erect while on their knees was equally tiring, and some assumed the cross-legged posture of the Buddhist.' Ngũgĩ sided with the oppressed, but his imagination extended to all sides of his country's divides — a British officer who justifies the suffering he inflicts on local activists, or a young Kenyan idealist willing to lose all for his country's liberation. He parsed the conflicts between oral and written culture, between the city and the village, the educated and the illiterate, the foreigner and the native.
