Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o (Gikuyu pronunciation: [ᵑɡoɣe wá ðiɔŋɔ]; born 5 January 1938) is a Kenyan writer, formerly working in English and now working in Gikuyu. His work includes novels, plays, short stories, and essays, ranging from literary and social criticism to children’s literature. He is the founder and editor of the Gikuyu-language journal Mũtĩiri.
In 1977, Ngũgĩ embarked upon a novel form of theatre in his native Kenya that sought to liberate the theatrical process from what he held to be “the general bourgeois education system”, by encouraging spontaneity and audience participation in the performances. His project sought to “demystify” the theatrical process, and to avoid the “process of alienation [that] produces a gallery of active stars and an undifferentiated mass of grateful admirers” which, according to Ngũgĩ, encourages passivity in “ordinary people”. Although Ngaahika Ndeenda was a commercial success, it was shut down by the authoritarian Kenyan regime six weeks after its opening.
Ngũgĩ was subsequently imprisoned for over a year. Adopted as an Amnesty International prisoner of conscience, the artist was released from prison, and fled Kenya. In the United States, he taught at Yale University for some years, and has since also taught at New York University, with a dual professorship in Comparative Literature and Performance Studies, and at the University of California, Irvine. Ngũgĩ has frequently been regarded as a likely candidate for the Nobel Prize in Literature. His son is the author Mũkoma wa Ngũgĩ.

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Biography

Ngũgĩ was born in Kamiriithu, near Limuru in Kiambu district, Kenya, of Kikuyu descent, and baptised James Ngugi. His family was caught up in the Mau Mau War; his half-brother Mwangi was actively involved in the Kenya Land and Freedom Army, and his mother was tortured at Kamiriithu homeguard post. He attended The Alliance High School. He received a B.A. in English from Makerere University College in Kampala, Uganda, in 1963; during his education, a play of his, The Black Hermit, was produced in Kampala in 1962.

Ngũgĩ published his first novel, Weep Not, Child, in 1964. It was the first novel in English to be published by a writer from East Africa. His second novel, The River Between (1965), which was published while he was attending the University of Leeds in England, has as its background the Mau Mau rebellion, and described an unhappy romance between Christians and non-Christians. The River Between is currently on Kenya’s national secondary school syllabus.

His novel A Grain of Wheat (1967) marked his embrace of Fanonist Marxism. He subsequently renounced English, Christianity, and the name James Ngugi as colonialist; he changed his name back to Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, and began to write in his native Gikuyu and Swahili.

In 1976 he helped set up The Kamiriithu Community Education and Cultural Centre which, among other things, organised African Theatre in the area. The uncensored political message of his 1977 play Ngaahika Ndeenda (I Will Marry When I Want) provoked the then Kenyan Vice-President Daniel arap Moi to order his arrest. While detained in the Kamiti Maximum Security Prison, Ngũgĩ wrote the first modern novel in Gikuyu, Caitaani mũtharaba-Inĩ (Devil on the Cross), on prison-issued toilet paper.

After his release, he was not reinstated to his job as professor at Nairobi University, and his family was harassed. Due to his writing about the injustices of the dictatorial government at the time, Ngugi and his family were forced to live in exile. Only after Arap Moi was voted out of office, 22 years later, was it safe for them to return.

His later works include Detained, his prison diary (1981), Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature (1986), an essay arguing for African writers’ expression in their native languages rather than European languages, in order to renounce lingering colonial ties and to build an authentic African literature, and Matigari (1987), one of his most famous works, a satire based on a Gikuyu folktale.

In 1992, Ngũgĩ became a professor of Comparative Literature and Performance Studies at New York University, where he held the Erich Maria Remarque Chair. He is currently a Distinguished Professor of English and Comparative Literature as well as the Director of the International Center for Writing and Translation at the University of California, Irvine.

On 8 August 2004, Ngũgĩ returned to Kenya as part of a month-long tour of East Africa. On 11 August, robbers broke into his high-security apartment: they assaulted Ngũgĩ, sexually assaulted his wife and stole various items of value. Since then, Ngũgĩ has returned to America, and in the summer 2006 the American publishing firm Random House published his first new novel in nearly two decades, Wizard of the Crow, translated to English from Gikuyu by the author.

On 10 November 2006, while in San Francisco at Hotel Vitale at the Embarcadero, Ngũgĩ was harassed and ordered to leave the hotel by an employee. The event led to a public outcry and angered both African-Americans and members of the African diaspora living in America, prompting an apology by the hotel.

His most recent books are Something Torn and New: An African Renaissance, a collection of essays published in 2009 making the argument for the crucial role of African languages in “the resurrection of African memory,” and two autobiographical works: Dreams in a Time of War: a Childhood Memoir (2010) and In the House of the Interpreter: A Memoir (2012).

Awards and honours

• 1973 Lotus Prize for Literature
• 2001 Nonino International Prize for Literature
• 2009: Shortlisted for the Man Booker International Prize
• 2012 National Book Critics Circle Award (finalist Autobiography) for In the House of the Interpreter
• 2014 Nicolás Guillén Lifetime Achievement Award for Philosophical Literature
• 2016 Park Kyong-ni Prize

Honorary degrees

• University of Dar es Salaam, Honorary doctorate in Literature, November 2013
• University of Bayreuth, Honorary doctorate (Dr. phil. h.c.), 5 May 2014

• Rollyson, Carl Edmund; Magill, Frank Northen (June 2003). Critical Survey of Drama: Jane Martin – Lennox Robinson. Salem Press. p. 2466. ISBN 978-1-58765-107-6. Retrieved 25 November 2011. 
• “Some of the Prize Winners”. Nonino Distillatori S.p.A. Retrieved 6 May 2014. 
• ^ “Ehrendoktorwürde der Universität Bayreuth für Professor Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o (German)”. University of Bayreuth. Retrieved 6 May 2014. 
• “Ngugi Wa Thiong’o” Booker Prize Foundation. Accessed 22 October 2016
• “James Kelman is UK’s hope for Man Booker international prize” The Guardian. Accessed 22 October 2016
• John Williams (14 January 2012). “National Book Critics Circle Names 2012 Award Finalists”. The New York Times. Retrieved 15 January 2013. 
• “The Nicolas Guillén Philosophical Literature Prize”. Caribbean Philosophical Association. Retrieved 6 May 2014. 
• “Ngugi Wa Thiongo wins 6th Pak Kyong-ni Literature Award”. donga.com. September 21, 2016. Retrieved September 24, 2016. 
• “43rd graduation” (PDF). University of Dar es Salaam. November 2013. Retrieved 21 November 2013. 

List of works

• The Black Hermit, 1963 (play)
• Weep Not, Child, 1964, Heinemann, 1987, Macmillan 2005, ISBN 1-4050-7331-4
• The River Between, Heinemann 1965, Heinemann 1989, ISBN 0-435-90548-1
• A Grain of Wheat, 1967 (1992), ISBN 0-14-118699-2
• This Time Tomorrow (three plays, including the title play, “The Reels”, and “The Wound in the Heart”), c. 1970
• Homecoming: Essays on African and Caribbean Literature, Culture, and Politics, Heinemann, 1972, ISBN 0-435-18580-2
• A Meeting in the Dark (1974)
• Secret Lives, and Other Stories, 1976, Heinemann, 1992, ISBN 0-435-90975-4
• The Trial of Dedan Kimathi (play), 1976, ISBN 0-435-90191-5, African Publishing Group, ISBN 0-949932-45-0 (with Micere Githae Mugo and Njaka)
• Ngaahika Ndeenda: Ithaako ria ngerekano (I Will Marry When I Want), 1977 (play; with Ngugi wa Mirii), Heinemann Educational Books (1980)
• Petals of Blood (1977) Penguin, 2002, ISBN 0-14-118702-6
• Caitaani mutharaba-Ini (Devil on the Cross), 1980
• Writers in Politics: Essays, 1981, ISBN 978-0-85255-541-5 (UK), ISBN 978-0-435-08985-6 (US)
• Education for a National Culture, 1981
• Detained: A Writer’s Prison Diary, 1981
• Devil on the Cross (English translation of Caitaani mutharaba-Ini), Heinemann, 1982, ISBN 0-435-90200-8
• Barrel of a Pen: Resistance to Repression in Neo-Colonial Kenya, 1983
• Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature, 1986, ISBN 978-0-85255-501-9 (UK), ISBN 978-0-435-08016-7 (US)
• Mother, Sing For Me, 1986
• Writing against Neo-Colonialism, 1986
• Njamba Nene and the Flying Bus (Njamba Nene na Mbaathi i Mathagu), 1986 (children’s book)
• Matigari ma Njiruungi, 1986
• Njamba Nene and the Cruel Chief (Njamba Nene na Chibu King’ang’i), 1988 (children’s book)
• Matigari (translated into English by Wangui wa Goro), Heinemann, 1989, Africa World Press 1994, ISBN 0-435-90546-5
• Njamba Nene’s Pistol (Bathitoora ya Njamba Nene), (children’s book), 1990, Africa World Press, ISBN 0-86543-081-0
• Moving the Centre: The Struggle for Cultural Freedom, Heinemann, 1993, ISBN 978-0-435-08079-2 (US) ISBN 978-0-85255-530-9 (UK)
• Penpoints, Gunpoints and Dreams: The Performance of Literature and Power in Post-Colonial Africa (The Clarendon Lectures in English Literature 1996), Oxford University Press, 1998. ISBN 0-19-818390-9
• Mũrogi wa Kagogo (Wizard of the Crow), 2004, East African Educational Publishers, ISBN 9966-25-162-6
• Wizard of the Crow, 2006, Secker, ISBN 1-84655-034-3
• Something Torn and New: An African Renaissance, Basic Civitas Books, 2009, ISBN 978-0-465-00946-6
• Dreams in a Time of War: a Childhood Memoir, Harvill Secker, 2010, ISBN 978-1-84655-377-6
• In the House of the Interpreter: A Memoir, Pantheon, 2012, ISBN 978-0-30790-769-1
• Birth of a Dream Weaver: A Memoir of a Writer’s Awakening, New Press, 2016, ISBN 978-1-62097-240-3

• Daily Nation, Lifestyle Magazine, 13 June 2009: Queries over Ngugi’s appeal to save African languages, culture