Awoonor, Kofi

Kofi Awoonor, original name George Kofi Awoonor Williams, (born March 13, 1935, Weta, Gold Coast [now Ghana]—died September 21, 2013, Nairobi, Kenya), Ghanaian novelist and poet whose verse has been widely translated and anthologized.

After graduating (1960) from the University College of the Gold Coast (now the University of Ghana, Legon), Awoonor studied at University College, London (M.A., 1970), and the State University of New York at Stony Brook (Ph.D., 1972), where he remained on the faculty until he returned to Ghana (1975) to teach at the University of Cape Coast. He also lectured in English and African literature at the University of Ghana, directed the Ghana Film Corporation, founded the Ghana Playhouse, and served as an editor of the literary journal Okyeame and as an associate editor of Transition. In the early 1970s he served as chairman of the department of comparative literature at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. He returned to Ghana in August 1975 to teach at the University College of Cape Coast, but that December he was arrested on charges of harbouring an army officer accused of attempting a government coup. He was found guilty, but his sentence was remitted in October 1976, and he resumed teaching. He later served as Ghana’s ambassador to Brazil (1984–88), Cuba (1988–90), and the United Nations (1990–94).

Awoonor sought to incorporate African vernacular traditions—notably the dirge song tradition of the Ewe people—into modern poetic form. His major themes—Christianity, exile, and death important among them—are enlarged from poem to poem by repetition of key lines and phrases and by use of extended rhythms. Each poem in Rediscovery and Other Poems (1964), for example, records a single moment in a larger pattern of recognition and rediscovery. Awoonor’s subsequent volumes of poetry include Night of My Blood (1971), Ride Me, Memory (1973), The House by the Sea (1978), and Latin American and Caribbean Notebook (1992). His collected poems (through 1985) were published in Until the Morning After (1987). A posthumous collection, The Promise of Hope: New and Selected Poems, 1964–2013, which included work unpublished at the time of his death, was released in 2014.

Awoonor also wrote a novel, This Earth, My Brother (1971), and two short plays. His nonfiction work includes The Breast of the Earth: A Survey of the History, Culture, and Literature of Africa South of the Sahara (1975), Comes the Voyager at Last: A Tale of Return to Africa (1992), and The African Predicament (2006).

In 2013 Awoonor was killed during a terrorist attack on the Westgate shopping centre in Nairobi.