An Audience with Ngugi Wa Thiong'o

The Kenyan author Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o is one of the giants of African literature and a world-famous novelist, author of A Grain of Wheat, The River Between, Weep Not Child, Petals of Blood, Devil on the Cross and Matigari, and the seminal collection of political essays Decolonising the Mind.

Since coming to prominence in the 1960s he has been imprisoned, prevented from staging plays by government troops, and had his books impounded by the Kenyan authorities under farcical circumstances. Ngũgĩ is visiting the UK from New York to launch his autobiography Dreams in a Time of War, a witty and moving memoir that describes his life as the fifth child of his father’s third wife in a family that included twenty-four children born to four different mothers, against a backdrop of World War II and the violent Mau Mau uprising of the Kikuyu clan against the British. This is his only appearance to take place in the Midlands.