George Kofi Nyidevu Awoonor-Williams was born on March 13, 1935, in Wheta, in the Volta region of what was then the Gold Coast, present-day Ghana. He was the eldest of 10 children in the family. He was a paternal descendant of the Awoonor-Williams family of Sierra Leone Creole descent. He was a poet, literary critic, diplomat and a professor of comparative literature at numerous universities, including the University of Ghana.
Kofi Awoonor’s grandmother was an Ewe dirge singer, and the form of his early poetry draws from the Ewe oral tradition. He translated Ewe poetry in his critical study Guardians of the Sacred Word and Ewe Poetry (1974). Other works of literary criticism include The Breast of the Earth: A Survey of the History, Culture, and Literature of Africa South of the Sahara (1975). He is author of the novels This Earth, My Brother… (1971) and Comes the Voyager at Last: A Tale of Return to Africa (1992).
After graduating (1960) from the University College of the Gold Coast (now the University of Ghana, Legon), Awoonor studied at University College, London (M.A., 1970), and the State University of New York at Stony Brook (Ph.D., 1972), where he remained on the faculty until he returned to Ghana (1975) to teach at the University of Cape Coast. He also lectured in English and African literature at the University of Ghana, directed the Ghana Film Corporation, founded the Ghana Playhouse, and served as an editor of the literary journal Okyeame and as an associate editor of Transition.
In the early 1970s he served as chairman of the department of comparative literature at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. He returned to Ghana in August 1975 to teach at the University College of Cape Coast, but that December he was arrested on charges of harbouring an army officer accused of attempting a government coup. He was found guilty, but his sentence was remitted in October 1976, and he resumed teaching. He later served as Ghana’s ambassador to Brazil (1984–88), Cuba (1988–90), and the United Nations (1990–94).
He died in the Westgate shopping mall attack in Kenya in September 2013. Awoonor’s remains were flown from Nairobi to Accra, Ghana, on 25 September 2013. His body was cremated and buried at a particular spot in his hometown at Wheta in the Volta Region.
