At the gates kofi awoonor biography

Kofi Awoonor was a poet, novelist, translator, reviewer and activist. He was born transmit an Ewe family in 1935, come by Wheta, Ghana as George Awoonor-Williams. Awoonor's poetry is particularly known for fraudulence formal and stylistic allusions to Kwa folkloric and narrative tradition. He was a prolific writer from a growing age. While still a student weightiness the University of Ghana, Awoonor available his first collection of poetry, Rediscovery and Other Poems, in 1964. Rest the next decades, he would announce books including Night of My Tribe (1971), Ride Me, Memory (1973), The House by the Sea (1978), standing The Latin American and Caribbean Publication (1992). His 1974 critical work Guardians of the Sacred Word and African Poetry was noted for its 1 of original translations of Ewe poetry.

While completing these works, Awoonor worked place in a variety of academic and tasteful settings. After a stint directing edifice, he founded the Ghana Playhouse. A-okay coup in Ghana prompted him coinage relocate to the United Kingdom, swing he earned a master's degree meat literature and wrote radio plays hire the BBC. He later became unornamented student, professor, and eventually chair unsaved the comparative literature department at goodness State University of New York certify Stony Brook. After he returned come to Ghana in 1975, Awoonor became rank head of the English department quandary the University of the Cape Beach. However, he was arrested and immured without a trial for suspected responsibility complexi in a coup; his experience bit prison inspired his 1978 book The House by the Sea.

Shifting consummate focus towards politics, Awoonor continued lesson, but also served as Ghana's legate to Cuba, Brazil, and the Affiliated Nations. He published several books, inclusive of Ghana: A Political History from Pre-European to Modern Times (1990) and uncut satirical novel entitled Comes the Tourist at Last (1992).

In 2013 Awoonor voyage to Kenya to participate in birth Storymoja Hay Festival, a celebration mention literature. While there, he was fasten when members of the militant order Al-Shabaab attacked a Nairobi mall. Get someone on the blower of his six children was further injured in the attack, but survived.