Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o

Ngũgĩ was born James Ngugi in colonial Kenya and lived through the Mau Mau Emergency as a boy, losing a brother to the fighting; he wrote his early novels, including A Grain of Wheat, in English while teaching at the University of Nairobi. In 1977 a play he co-wrote and staged with Kenyan peasants and workers, performed in Gikuyu rather than English, led the Kenyatta government to imprison him without trial for a year.

In detention he composed his first Gikuyu novel on toilet paper, having decided by then to abandon English fiction altogether as a colonial inheritance. Petals of Blood, his last English-language novel, had already provoked the state before his arrest. Released but still targeted, he went into exile in 1982 and has taught at American universities ever since, writing steadily in Gikuyu and translating his own work into English.