A Grain of Wheat

Africa is a huge continent with a diversity of cultures and languages. Africa is not simple — often people want to simplify it, generalize it, stereotype its people, but Africa is very complex. The world is just starting to get to know Africa. The last five hundred years of European contact with Africa produced a body of literature that presented Africa in a very bad light and now the time has come for Africans to tell their own stories.

The Penguin African Writers Series will bring a new energy to the publication of African literature. Penguin Books is committed to publishing both established and new voices from all over the African continent to ensure African stories reach a wider global audience.

This is really what I personally want to see — writers from all over Africa contributing to a definition of themselves, writing ourselves and our stories into history. One of the greatest things literature does is allow us to imagine; to identify with situations and people who live in completely different circumstances, in countries all over the world. Through this series, the creative exploration of those issues and experiences that are unique to the African consciousness will be given a platform, not only throughout Africa, but also to the world beyond its shores.

Storytelling is a creative component of human experience and in order to share our experiences with the world, we as Africans need to recognize the importance of our own stories. By starting the series on the solid foundations laid by the renowned Heinemann African Writers Series, I am honored to join Penguin in inviting young and upcoming writers to accept the challenge passed down by celebrated African authors of earlier decades and to continue to explore, confront and question the realities of life in Africa through their work; challenging Africa’s people to lift her to her rightful place among the nations of the world.

PENGUIN
CLASSICS

A GRAIN OF WHEAT

NG
G
WA THIONG’O
was born in Limuru, Kenya, in 1938. One of the leading African writers and scholars at work today, he is the author of
Weep Not, Child; The River Between; A Grain of Wheat; Homecoming; Petals of Blood; Devil on the Cross; Matigari; Decolonizing the Mind; Moving the Center; Writers in Politics;
and
Penpoints, Gunpoints, and Dreams
, among other works, which include novels, short stories, essays, a memoir, and plays. In 1977, the year he published
Petals of Blood
, Ng
g
’s play
I Will Marry When I Want
(cowritten with Ng
g
wa M
ri
and harshly critical of the injustices of Kenyan society) was performed, and at the end of the year Ng
g
was arrested. He was detained for a year without trial at a maximum security prison in Kenya. The theater where the play was performed was razed by police in 1982.