Birth of a Dream Weaver: A Writer’s Awakening

One of Oprah.com’s ＂17 Must-Read Books for the New Year＂ and O Magazine’s ＂10 Titles to Pick up Now.＂

＂Exquisite in its honesty and truth and resilience, and a necessary chronicle from one of the greatest writers of our time. ＂
--Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, The Guardian, Best Books of 2016.

＂Every page ripples with a contagious faith in education and in the power of literature to shape the imagination and scour the conscience.＂
--The Washington Post

From one of the world’s greatest writers, the story of how the author found his voice as a novelist at Makerere University in Uganda

Birth of a Dream Weaver charts the very beginnings of a writer’s creative output. In this wonderful memoir, Kenyan writer Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o recounts the four years he spent at Makerere University in Kampala, Uganda--threshold years during which he found his voice as a journalist, short story writer, playwright, and novelist just as colonial empires were crumbling and new nations were being born--under the shadow of the rivalries, intrigues, and assassinations of the Cold War.

Haunted by the memories of the carnage and mass incarceration carried out by the British colonial-settler state in his native Kenya but inspired by the titanic struggle against it, Ngũgĩ, then known as James Ngugi, begins to weave stories from the fibers of memory, history, and a shockingly vibrant and turbulent present.

What unfolds in this moving and thought-provoking memoir is simultaneously the birth of one of the most important living writers--lauded for his ＂epic imagination＂ (Los Angeles Times)--the death of one of the most violent episodes in global history, and the emergence of new histories and nations with uncertain futures.

作者簡介

　　Ngugi wa Thiong’o is one of the leading writers and scholars at work in the world today. His books include the novels Petals of Blood, for which he was imprisoned by the Kenyan government in 1977, A Grain of Wheat and Wizard of the Crow; the memoirs, Dreams in a Time of War and In the House of the Interpreter; and the essays, Decolonizing the Mind, Something Torn and New and Globalectics. Recipient of many honours, among them 10 honorary doctorates, he is currently Distinguished Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Irvine.