Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o

Author of nine novels, eight plays, twelve volumes of literary criticism, and three memoirs inspired by a passionate, life-long commitment to language, not simply as a means of communication, but as a way of being. His fiction focused on the quiet courage of Kenyans in the face of rampant corruption and terror. While a political prisoner, he wrote his novel Devil on the Cross on toilet paper. Released in 1979, he went into exile. In 1986, when Kenyan authorities realized that a central character in his novel Matigari (for whom they had issued an arrest warrant) was fictional, they launched a book-burning campaign. An advocate for human rights and African indigenous languages, he addressed the United Nations General Assembly, twice. Honors included the Order of the Elder of Burning Spear by the Kenyan government, Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and subject of the documentary, Who's Afraid of Ngugi? (2004).