Kofi Awoonor
Biography
Kofi Awoonor was born in 1935 in Wheta, Ghana and grew up as George Awoonor-Williams. His father was a trader and tailor. When Awoonor was eight, the family moved to Keta. He studied English at University College of the Gold Coast and then taught at the University of Ghana. He published his first book of poetry in 1971. He became head of the Ghana Film Industries Corporation before studying for a M. A. at the University of London. He then taught in the United States, where he wrote This Earth, My Brother … An Allegorical Tale of Africa. He returned to Ghana in 1975 but was soon arrested for involvement in an attempted coup and held eight months till his trial. He was found guilty and sentenced to a year in prison but never served any further time in prison. Since then, he has been much more active in Ghanaian politics, including spells as Ghanaian ambassador to Brazil, Cuba and the United Nations. He was killed in the September 2013 attack at Westgate shopping mall in Nairobi, Kenya,
Other links
Bibliography
1964 Rediscovery and Other Poems (poetry)
1971 Night of My Blood (poetry)
1971 This Earth, My Brother … An Allegorical Tale of Africa (novel)
1972 Come Back, Ghana
1973 Ride Me, Memory (poetry)
1975 The Breast of the Earth: A Survey of the History, Culture and Literature of Africa South of the Sahara
1978 The House by the Sea (poetry)
1984 The Ghana Revolution: A Background Account from a Personal Perspective
1987 Until the Morning After: Collected Poems (poetry)
1990 Ghana: A Political History from Pre-European to Modern Times
1992 Comes the Voyager at Last: A Tale of Return to Africa (novel)
1992 The Latin American and Caribbean Notebook (poetry)
1994 Africa, the Marginalized Continent
2002 Herding the Lost Lamb (poetry)
2006 The African Predicament: Collected Essays
2014 The Promise of Hope: New and Selected Poems