Top 5 Authors

Top 5 Authors

This article lists 5 authors who we believe has made massive contributions and headway both on the African literature scene and also on world literature. 

Every one of them infuses various elements of literature such as characterisation, universality and also a deep sense of connection to their readers.

 It is pertinent to note that while this isn’t a universal list or a list imposed on any of our readers, every author that makes this list have contributed massively to literature as we know it to be and it’s a honor having them on our curated list.

With that being said, let’s dive right in.

1) Adaobi Tricia Obinne Nwaubani - Popularly known as the first African novelist to start her writing career in her home country, Nigeria.

She had her secondary education at Federal Girls College, Owerri, and proceeded to earn a degree in psychology at the first university in Nigeria.

Adaobi won her first writing competition at age thirteen.

She was launched into limelight when her debut novel "I do not come to you by chance" won the 2010 Commonwealth Writers Prize for the Best First Book in Africa.

In that same year, her book also earned her another spot on the Betty Trask Book Award.

Her second debut Young Adult novel "Buried Beneath The Baobab Tree" which is based on a true life story won the 2018 Raven Award for Excellence in Arts and Entertainment.

Fortunately for Adaobi, it was also named as one of the American Library Association’s Best Fiction for Young Adults.

She has just two books to her name, coupled with some essays you can check up online.

Below are the links to her books.

I do not come to you by chance.

Buried beneath the baobab tree

2) Olaniyi Osundare - One of Africa's foremost poets was born in Ikere Ekiti in 1947.

He is a poet, an essayist, and a dramatist amongst many others. 

He studied English at the Prestigious University of Ibadan before going abroad to earn a master's degree in that same field.

He has published over 18 books of poetry and has received numerous prizes and awards, including the Association of Nigerian Authors (ANA) prize, the Cadbury/ANA Prize (twice), the Commonwealth poetry prize, the Noma Award, Tchicaya U Tam’si prize for African poetry (Africa’s highest poetry award), amongst many others.

In 1991, he became the first anglophone poet to win the NOMA award.

Now, he is an emeritus professor at a university in New Orleans.

HIs poems are also published on Amazon.

3) Margaret Atwood (born November 18, 1939) is a Canadian writer who through her works has made wholesome attempts to reclaim the Canadian identity through her fiction and criticism. 

Pieces Atwood’s novels and poems have always shown a deep sense of sorrow and intense pain of persons with fragmented conscience. 

The writer has gone home with the Booker Price twice: in 2000 for The Blind Assassin and in 2019 for The Testaments , but those aren’t the only awards she has won.

 She has also won the Arthur C. Clarke Award, the Governor General's Award, the Franz Kafka Prize, Princess of Asturias Awards, and the National Book Critics and PEN Center USA Lifetime Achievement Awards . Some of her famous works , a number of them which have been adapted for film and television include:

Scribbler Moon

The Heart Goes Last

Hag-Seed

The Surfacing

The Handmaid’s Tale

The Robber Bride

The Blind Assassin

The Testaments

4) Hilary Mantel (born July 6, 1952) is the first woman writer to have won the Booker Prize twice: in 2012 for Bring Up The Bodies and in 2009 for her novel Wolf Hall which is a fictional account of Thomas Cromwell’s rise to power in the court of Henry VIII . 

These award-winning novels are part of a trilogy on the life and times of Oliver Cromwell, and its last part, The Mirror and the Light, was published on the 5th of march in 2020 in the UK and the following July was longlisted for the 2020 Booker Prize also!!  

Mantel, who draws inspiration mostly from the annals of history, has fictionalised the past to Render vivid cataclysmic experiences which are tragic and unavoidable. 

Mantel’s historical novels and memoirs always has a prophetic side to it as the author uses history to tell human idiosyncrasies and fallacies. 

Some of Hilary Mantel's Famous Works also includes the following: 

The Thomas Cromwell Trilogy

Vacant Possession

Eight Months on Ghazzah Street

An Experiment in Love

 

5) Mo Yan- Born – Born on the 17th of February, 1955 is an author who won the Nobel Prize for literature in 2012 and has helped redefine the sensibilities of readers through his novels and short stories.

 He has created his own narrative style infusing invigorated traditional folk narratives of China with magical realism and temporal imagination which he has used for polysensorial multifocalization. 

Mo Yan’s novels express anguish and the deep anxieties of the common man in totalitarian societies without explicitly criticising the state. 

His real name is Guan Moye and He is best known to Western readers for his 1986 novel Red Sorghum, the first two parts of which were adapted as the Golden Bear-winning film Red Sorghum (1988). 

He also won the 2005 International Nonino Prize in Italy. In 2009, he was the first recipient of the University of Oklahoma's Newman Prize for Chinese Literature.

Some of Mo Yan’s Famous Works include: 

Red Sorghum

The Republic of Wine

Red Forest

Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out and, 

Frog