Glamtush reports that one of Africa’s most celebrated authors and playwrights, Ghanaian Ama Ata Aidoo, is dead.
The death of the playwright and poet who was famous for her feminist ideals was announced on Wednesday in a short statement by her family.
The cause of death was an undisclosed illness.
In a statement, her family said “our beloved relative and writer” passed away after a short illness, requesting privacy to allow them to grieve.
Born in 1942 in a village in central Ghana, Aidoo began writing at 15. She ended up studying literature at the University of Ghana, where she lectured for years.
Her first work, The Dilemma of a Ghost, a play, was published in 1965, making her the first African woman to publish a play. She went on to become one of the continent’s best-known writers, inspiring a generation of younger authors, artists and feminists.
Aidoo, who was Ghana’s education minister from 1982 to 1983, won the Commonwealth Writers Prize for Best Book for Changes, a story about an educated woman navigating the complexities of a polygamous marriage.
A university professor, Ata Aidoo won many literary awards for her novels, plays and poems, including the 1992 Commonwealth Writers Prize for Changes, a love story about a statistician who divorces her first husband and enters into a polygamous marriage.
Her work, including plays like Anowa, have been read in schools across West Africa, along with works of other greats like Wole Soyinka and Chinua Achebe.
When asked by BBC HARDTalk’s Zeinab Badawi in 2014 if she regarded herself as a writer with a mission, she replied: “In retrospect, I suppose I could describe myself as a writer with a mission. But I never was aware that I had a mission when I started to write.
“People sometimes question me, for instance, why are your women so strong? And I say, that is the only woman I know.”
She was a major influence on the younger generation of writers, including Nigeria’s awarding-winning Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.
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