Peter K. Palangyo (1939 - 18 January 1993) was a Tanzanian novelist and diplomat. His reputation rests on a single novel, Dying in the Sun (1968), which is considered by many to be one of the most compelling works of modernism in African writing from this period. [1]
Born to Rwa parents in Meru District of Arusha Region, Palangyo was educated locally, in Uganda and the United States. He majored in biology at St. Olaf College in Northfield, Minnesota, and went on to graduate school at the University of Minnesota. Abandoning the sciences for literature, he earned a diploma of education from Makerere University College and taught in several secondary schools. In 1968, Palangyo returned to the United States to join the writers' workshop at the University of Iowa, and received an MFA in creative writing. Returning to Tanzania in 1972, he taught at the University of Dar es Salaam before joining the diplomatic service. At one point he was Tanzania's Ambassador to France. [1] In 1980, he earned a PhD from University at Buffalo, The State University of New York, with a thesis on Chinua Achebe. [2]
Palangyo died in a car accident in 1993. [1]
Chinua Achebe was a Nigerian novelist, poet, and critic who is regarded as a central figure of modern African literature. His first novel and magnum opus, Things Fall Apart (1958), occupies a pivotal place in African literature and remains the most widely studied, translated, and read African novel. Along with Things Fall Apart, his No Longer at Ease (1960) and Arrow of God (1964) complete the "African Trilogy". Later novels include A Man of the People (1966) and Anthills of the Savannah (1987). In the West, Achebe is often referred to as the "father of African literature", although he vigorously rejected the characterization.
Ayi Kwei Armah is a Ghanaian writer best known for his novels including The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born (1968), Two Thousand Seasons (1973) and The Healers (1978). He is also an essayist, as well as having written poetry, short stories, and books for children.
African literature is literature from Africa, either oral ("orature") or written in African and Afro-Asiatic languages. Examples of pre-colonial African literature can be traced back to at least the fourth century AD. The best-known is the Kebra Negast, or "Book of Kings."
Vincent Chukwuemeka Ike OFR, NNOM was a Nigerian monarch, academic and writer known for a mixture of lampoon, humour and satire. He owed a little bit of his style to his Igbo cultural upbringing. He studied history, English and Religious Studies at the University of Ibadan and earned a master's degree at Stanford University. Among many of the first generation of Nigerian writers, he was popular as the author of Expo '77, a critical look at academic examination abuses in West Africa. Ike was a former registrar of the West African Examinations Council (WAEC).
Civil Peace is a 1971 short story by Chinua Achebe. It is about the effects of the Nigerian Civil War (1967–1970) on the people and the "civil peace" that followed.
Simon E. Gikandi is a Kenyan Literature Professor and Postcolonial scholar. He is the Class of 1943 University Professor of English at Princeton University. He is perhaps best known for his co-editorship of The Cambridge History of African and Caribbean Literature. He has also done important work on the modern African novel, and two distinguished African novelists: Chinua Achebe and Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o. In 2019 he became the president of the Modern Language Association.
Steve Bernard Miles Chimombo was a Malawian writer, poet, editor and teacher. He was born in Zomba.
Gabriel Ruhumbika is a Tanzanian born novelist, short story writer, translator and academic. His first novel, Village in Uhuru, was published in 1969. He has written several subsequent novels in Swahili. He has also taught literature at a number of universities, and, until his retirement in 2016, he was a professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Georgia in the USA.
Phanuel Egejuru is a Nigerian writer and academician, whose areas of focus are composition, short fiction, Black literature and aesthetics, 19th-century British fiction and Victorian England. She is best known for her 1993 novel The Seed Yams Have Been Eaten.
Charles Raymond Larson was an American scholar of literature, particularly of African literature. He published a number of anthologies of African literature, as well as literary criticism, and is seen as one of the founders of the study of African literature in the United States.
Ezenwa-Ohaeto (1958–2005) was a Nigerian poet, short story writer and academic. He was one of the first Nigerians to publish poems written in pidgin English. He died in Cambridge in 2005.
Gordon Douglas Killam (1930-2020), known to friends as Doug Killam, was a Canadian scholar of African literature.
Ossie Enekwe born Onuora Osmond Enekwechi was a Nigerian dramatist, poet, novelist, and professor of Theatre Arts. A former vice president of the Association of Nigerian Authors (ANA) as well as the former director of the Institute of African Studies at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka (1998–2004). He helped to establish the University of Nigeria's Dramatic Arts Department. Enekwe was the editor of Okike: The African Journal of New Writing from 1984 to 2010, after being appointed by its founder, Chinua Achebe, who founded it in 1971. When Ossie Enekwe retired in 2010, he handed over the editorship of Okike to Amechi Akwanya.
Mpalive-Hangson Msiska is a Malawian academic resident in London, England. He is a Reader Emeritus in English and Humanities at Birkbeck College, University of London, with research and teaching interests in critical and cultural theory as well as postcolonial literature, including African literature, Wole Soyinka and Chinua Achebe being notable subjects of his writing.