Ngugi wa Thiong’o

Ngugi wa Thiong’o was born into a peasant family in Kenya in 1938, one of his father’s twenty-four children, and he published his first novel, Weep Not, Child, in 1964, the same year that he graduated from Leeds University. While serving as the head of the English department at Nairobi University College in 1977, he was arrested without charge by the Kenyan government and served one year in prison, during which he wrote Devil on the Cross on toilet paper.