His U.S. publisher, The New Press, has just released "Decolonizing Language," which the author praises as a "beautiful" title. "Decolonizing Language" includes essays and poems written between 2000 and 2019, with subjects ranging from language and education to such friends and heroes as Nelson Mandela, Nadine Gordimer and Chinua Achebe, the Nigerian author whose 1958 novel, "Things Fall Apart," is considered by many the starting point for modern African literature.
Achebe also helped launch Ng~ug~i's career by showing a manuscript of an early novel, "Weep Not, Child," to publisher William Heinemann, who featured it in the landmark African Writers series. Ng~ug~i has been praised by critics and writers worldwide, and imprisoned, beaten, banned and otherwise threatened in his native country. Since the 1970s, he has mostly lived overseas, emigrating to England and eventually settling in California, where he is a Distinguished Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Irvine.
"I very much like the African American writers. I discovered them at Makerere University (in Uganda), and Caribbean writers like George Lamming were very important to me. The writers of the Harlem Renaissance fired my imagination and made me feel I could be a writer, too. ... At the Makerere conference (the African Writers Conference, in 1962), I met with Langston Hughes, and oh my God it was so great!.
Langston Hughes of the Harlem Renaissance! To shake hands with a world famous writer was very very important to me." Young Spaniard Juan Ayuso leads the UAE Team Emirates challenge in the absence of Pogacar having won the week-long Tirreno-Adriatico this season and going toe-to-toe with Roglic in a fierce battle in Catalunya. Backed by a strong Red Bull-Bora-Hansgrohe team, including 2022 champion Jai Hindley of Australia, four-time Vuelta a Espana winner Roglic could surpass the record of Fiorenzo Magni who won the Giro, aged 34 and 180 days, in 1955.
Roglic began the season in fine fashion by winning the Tour of Catalunya but with Hindley and also 2024 runner-up Dani Martinez in their starting list, Red Bull-Bora Hansgrohe boast a three-pronged General Classification (GC) attack. Albania is hosting a Grand Tour for the first time with the first of three stages in the Balkan country being Saturday's hilly 160 km stage from Durazzo to Tirana before Sunday's short time trial around Tirana. After a third stage featuring the race's first climb to 1,000 metres, the Giro heads back across the Adriatic to Lecce before snaking its way up the country.
"On the one hand, I am grateful to be here and to have a job at a California university, as a distinguished professor. I appreciate that. But I was coming from a country which was a white seller colony, and I can't forget that when I'm here.