He is a well respected Kenyan Author. No African writer has as many major, lasting creative achievements in such a wide range of genre as Ngugi wa Thiong'o. His books include novels, plays, short stories, essays and scholarship, criticism and children's literature. Ngugi wa Thiong'o (born 1938) was Kenya's most famous writer. Best-known as a novelist, he also wrote plays, literary criticism, and essays on cultural and political topics.

In December 1977 he was arrested by the Kenyan government and detained for a year; no formal charges were ever filed against him, but it is assumed that his involvement in an adult literacy campaign aimed at raising the political consciousness of peasants and workers in his hometown of Limuru led to his imprisonment. In 1982 he went to England at the invitation of his publisher (Heinemann Educational Books) to launch a novel he had written while in detention. During his absence there was an attempted coup in Kenya, after which a number of his friends and associates fled the country. Ngugi wa Thiong'o chose to live in exile in London. Ngugi came to the United States, teaching at Yale University and Amherst College before becoming the Erich Maria Remarque professor of comparative literature and a professor of performance studies at New York University, New York City, New York. )