AFRICAN WRITERS like Chinua Achebe

1. Amos Tutola –contemporary of Chinua Achebe. The Palm wine Drinkard, My Life in the bush of
ghosts, The village witch doctor and other stories, the witch herbalist of the remote town,
pauper brawler and slanderer

2. Wole Soyinka - also a Nigerian contemporary of Achebe’s, was the first person in Africa to be
awarded the Nobel Prize in literature. He is best known for his poetry and plays, and Freyer
recommends his 1975 play Death and the King’s Horseman.

Death and the King’s Horsemen, The Lion and the Jewel, The Interpreters, The Man Died : Prison
Notes, Madmen and Specialists.

3. Camara Laye - from Guinea, wrote some of the earliest major works in Francophone African
literature. Freyer says check out The Radiance of the King, considered by Ghanaian-American
writer Kwame Anthony Appiah to be “one of the greatest of the African novels of the colonial
period.”

The Dark Child, L Enfant Noir, The Radiance of the King, Dramouss

4. Dinaw Mengestu - is a Washington, DC-based American writer born in Ethiopia, says Milbourne.
He has written two novels about the immigration experience, The Beautiful Things that Heaven
Bears (2007) and How to Read the Air (2010), and received a MacArthur Foundation “genius
grant” last year.
All our names, The Beautiful things that Heaven bears, How to read the air, Children of the
revolution!

5. Abraham Verghese - is an Ethiopian-born physician and author of Indian heritage, says

Milbourne. He has written two memoirs and a novel, all best sellers. The novel, Cutting for
Stone (2009), follows twin brothers in Ethiopia during its military revolution and in New York,
where one of them flees.
Cutting for Stone, My Own Country : A Doctor's Story of a Town and Its People in the Age of
Aids, The Tennis Partner.