Kofi Awoonor

Kofi Nyidevu Awoonor (born George Awoonor-Williams) was born in Wheta, in the Volta Region of the Gold Coast (now Ghana), on the thirteenth of March 1935. He took his undergraduate degree at the University of Ghana (1960), his master's at University College London (1968), and his doctorate in comparative literature at the State University of New York at Stony Brook (1972).

He produced over thirty volumes of poetry, fiction, and political and literary criticism across five decades. His major works include Rediscovery and Other Poems (1964), Night of My Blood (1971, his most-cited poetry collection), the novel This Earth, My Brother (1971), the literary-historical work The Breast of the Earth (1975), and the late poetry collection Promises of Hope: New and Selected Poems (2014, posthumous).

He served as Director of the Ghana Film Industry Corporation (1972), as Director of the Ghana Institute of Languages (1974-75), as Ghana's Ambassador to Brazil (1984-88), as Ambassador to Cuba (1988-90), and as Ambassador and Permanent Representative to the United Nations in New York (1990-1994). He served three years in detention in Ghana (1975-78) under the Ignatius Acheampong military regime for alleged involvement in a coup plot.

He delivered the keynote address at the inauguration of the African Union's Centre for Linguistic and Historical Studies by Oral Tradition in 2007 and chaired the Council of State of Ghana under President John Atta Mills from 2009 to 2012.

He was killed on the twenty-first of September 2013 in the al-Shabaab terrorist attack on the Westgate Shopping Mall in Nairobi, Kenya, where he had been attending the StoryMoja Hay Festival. He was seventy-eight. Sixty-seven other people died in the attack.

He is honored here as the poet-ambassador whose final journey was to a literary festival and whose final words to the press, two days before the attack, were on the necessity of African literature.