James Ngugi without question is Kenya\u27s most prominent and most highly regarded novelist to date. Of the same generation of writers as Achebe, Armah, Soyinka, and Owoonor of West Africa, Ngugi, like them, after a local university education, went abroad for advanced work. In 1964 at Leeds, Ngugi published his novel Weep Not, Child, written when he was a student at Makerere. Shortly thereafter, in 1965, he published The River Between which he had composed even earlier. With A Grain of Wheat the writer completed in 1967 a kind of trilogy, depicting for a western readership a literary explanation and clarification of the historic Kenyan struggle for independence. These novels, written in English, and some plays and short stories brought Ngugi an award in 1965 at the Dakar Festival of Negro Arts and subsequent critical acclaim and broad readership
