Ama Ata Aidoo

Aidoo trained as a playwright at the University of Ghana, where her 1964 drama The Dilemma of a Ghost was staged while she was still a student, and went on to teach literature in Ghana, Kenya, and the United States across a long academic career. She briefly served as Ghana's Secretary for Education in the early 1980s under the Rawlings government, resigning after little more than a year over the limits placed on free education.

Changes, her 1991 novel and the work that won her the Commonwealth Writers' Prize, follows an educated Ghanaian professional who chooses to become a second wife rather than settle for a conventional marriage, treating desire and independence as compatible rather than opposed. Aidoo continued writing plays, poetry, and fiction and founded a foundation to support African women writers before her death in 2023.