Kofi Awoonor
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Kofi Awoonor (born George Awoonor-Williams in 1935) is a Ghanaian poet and author, whose work combines the poetic traditions of his native Ewe people and contemporary and religious symbolism to depict Africa during decolonization.
A supporter of Kwame Nkrumah, Awoonor spent many years as a political exile in the United States. Upon his return to Ghana, he was implicated in an Ewe-backed plot to topple the regime, and spent 1975-76 in jail, charged with harboring a fugitive. On his release he returned to teaching at the University of Cape Coast.
From 1990 to 1994 Awoonor was Ghana's Ambassador to the United Nations where he headed the committee against apartheid.
Contents |
[edit] Poetry
- Rediscovery and Other Poems (1964)
- Night of My Blood (1971)
- The House By the Sea (1978)
[edit] Novels
- This Earth, My Brother (1971)
- Comes the Voyager at Last (1992)
[edit] Non-fiction
- The Breast of the Earth: A Survey of the History, Culture, and Literature of Africa South of the Sahara (1975) Anchor Press, ISBN 0385070535
- Ghana: A Political History from Pre-European to Modern Times (1990)
[edit] Further reading
- Robert Fraser, West African Poetry: A Critical History, Cambridge University Press (1986), ISBN 052131223X
- Kwame Anthony Appiah and Henry Louis Gates, Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African American Experience, Basic Civitas Books (1999), ISBN 0465000711 - p.153
