You are here

Ayi Kwei Armah

Please help us improve with this one minute survey (opens in a new tab)
Portrait of Ayi Kwei Armah
Ayi Kwei Armah (1939– ) was born into a Fante family in Takoradi. The port city was then under the control of the British Crown Colony of the Gold Coast but has been part of Ghana since 1957. After attending a colonial boarding school in the future capital of Accra, Armah studied in the US and achieved a degree in Sociology from Harvard University in 1963. He later travelled between Ghana, Algeria, and France, often working as an editor or translator for various Francophone publications, including Jeune Afrique. It was during this time that he read the anti-colonial works of Frantz Fanon who became a significant source of inspiration to Armah’s future writing. Following his successful completion of a degree in Creative Writing at Columbia University in 1970, Armah began teaching across Tanzania, Lesotho, and the US. Armah published several short pieces of writing for various international magazines, before releasing his first novel in 1968: The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born. Initially published by Houghton Mifflin in Boston, the novel was re-released the following year as part of Heinemann’s African Writers Series, a collection which went on to publish most of...
Read the essay: Ayi Kwei Armah by Daniele Nunziata
# Essay Title Description Contributor
1 Ayi Kwei Armah

Ayi Kwei Armah (1939– ) was born into a Fante family in Takoradi. The port city...

Daniele Nunziata