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Authors by Country · AfricaThe Best African Authors to Read
African literature is written in Arabic, French, Portuguese, English, Gikuyu and many other languages, and it reaches English readers through both original writing and translation. The writers here come from twelve countries, from Egypt and Morocco to Mozambique and Zimbabwe. Between them they cover colonial conquest, independence, civil war, exile and migration, as well as family life, marriage and the position of women, from the 1940s to the present.
The list is ordered chronologically by year of birth and takes one writer per country. Nigerian and South African writers have their own pages, so they are left out here; see the list of Nigerian authors for Achebe, Soyinka and Adichie. Every author has at least one book available in English, and translators are named where the book was not written in English.
Twelve African authors, and where to start with each
Naguib Mahfouz
1911–2006 · Cairo, Egypt
Naguib Mahfouz wrote more than thirty novels, most of them set in the old quarters of Cairo. His realist fiction follows Egyptian families and neighbourhoods through the twentieth century, through nationalism, political change and the pull of Western values, and his books include Midaq Alley (1947) and Children of Gebelawi (1959).
In 1988 he became the only Egyptian and the only Arab writer to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. In 1994, aged 82, he was stabbed in the neck by an extremist outside his home in Cairo and survived with lasting nerve damage.
Read Mahfouz if you want a long family saga with a city at its centre.
Start with Palace Walk (1956). The first volume of the Cairo Trilogy follows a strict patriarch and his family through the nationalist unrest of 1917–1919; translated by William M. Hutchins and Olive E. Kenny (1990).
Mariama Bâ
1929–1981 · Dakar, Senegal
Mariama Bâ wrote in French about the lives of Senegalese women: polygamy, friendship between women, faith, caste and the tension between tradition and modernity in a newly independent country. She wrote two short novels, the second published after her death.
So Long a Letter won the first Noma Award for Publishing in Africa in 1980. It is short enough to read in an afternoon and is available in English in Modupé Bodé-Thomas’s translation (1981).
Read Bâ if you want a short, direct novel about marriage and friendship between women.
Start with So Long a Letter (1979). After her husband dies, a widow writes to her closest friend during the mourning period, recalling how he secretly took a second wife. Or Scarlet Song (1981). Her posthumous second novel, about a cross-cultural marriage; translated by Dorothy S. Blair.
Tayeb Salih
1929–2009 · Karmakol, Sudan
Tayeb Salih wrote in Arabic about Sudanese village life on the Nile, reality and illusion, and about the meeting of the Arab world and Europe. His fiction deals with British colonialism, identity and alienation, and he worked for the BBC’s Arabic Service.
Season of Migration to the North was named one of the best Arabic novels of the twentieth century by the Arab Literary Academy in Damascus. Denys Johnson-Davies translated it into English in 1969, as well as the novella The Wedding of Zein.
Read Salih if you want a short, unsettling novel about colonialism and its aftermath.
Start with Season of Migration to the North (1966). A narrator returns to his village on the Nile from study abroad and becomes drawn into the past of Mustafa Sa’eed, a stranger with a violent history in England; translated by Denys Johnson-Davies. Or The Wedding of Zein (1966). A novella about a village eccentric who keeps falling for girls who marry other men.
Assia Djebar
1936–2015 · Cherchell, Algeria
Assia Djebar was the pen name of Fatima-Zohra Imalayen, novelist and filmmaker. Writing in French, she explored the lives of Algerian women under colonial rule and after it, mixing history, oral testimony and memory, and paying close attention to the role of language.
She won the Neustadt International Prize for Literature in 1996 and in 2005 became the first North African writer elected to the Académie française. Her books in English include Fantasia, Women of Algiers in Their Apartment and So Vast the Prison.
Read Djebar if you want history and memoir woven together.
Start with Fantasia: An Algerian Cavalcade (1985). Algeria from the 1830s to the 1950s, told through Algerian women under colonial rule, official records, oral histories and personal reflection; translated by Dorothy S. Blair (1993).
Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o
1938–2025 · Kamiriithu, Kenya
Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o wrote about colonialism, the Mau Mau uprising and class and power in independent Kenya. After a year in detention without trial in 1977–78, he stopped writing fiction in English and turned to Gikuyu; Devil on the Cross was written in prison on toilet paper. His essay Decolonising the Mind (1986) argues for African languages.
Weep Not, Child (1964) was the first English-language novel published by an East African writer. After his release from detention he went into exile and taught at universities in the United States. He died in Georgia in 2025, aged 87.
Read Ngũgĩ if you want to understand Kenya’s path to independence.
Start with A Grain of Wheat (1967). As his village prepares for Kenya’s independence in 1963, a respected man is tormented by his secret betrayal of a Mau Mau fighter. Or Weep Not, Child (1964). His first novel, the first English-language novel published by an East African writer.
Ama Ata Aidoo
1942–2023 · Abeadzi Kyiakor, Ghana
Ama Ata Aidoo wrote plays, stories and novels about African women who refuse the roles expected of them, and about the tension between African and Western ways of seeing. Her play The Dilemma of a Ghost (1965) made her the first published female African dramatist.
She served as Ghana’s Minister of Education in 1982–83 and resigned after about eighteen months. Her novel Our Sister Killjoy (1977) is her best-known work, and Changes won the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best Book (Africa) in 1992.
Read Aidoo if you want sharp, witty fiction about modern marriage.
Start with Changes: A Love Story (1991). A career woman in Accra divorces her husband and becomes the second wife of another man, hoping it will give her the freedom she wants.
Nuruddin Farah
Born 1945 · Baidoa, Somalia
Nuruddin Farah writes about Somalia, often in linked trilogies covering dictatorship, the Ogaden conflict, nationalism and migration. His novels give weight to women’s lives and to the question of identity after independence. He has described his aim as “to keep my country alive by writing about it”.
He began a self-imposed exile of about twenty-two years in 1976, after being warned he would be arrested over a novel. He won the Neustadt International Prize for Literature in 1998 and divides his time between Minneapolis and Cape Town.
Read Farah if you want ambitious, demanding literary fiction.
Start with Maps (1986). An orphan, Askar, is raised by his surrogate mother Misra against the background of the conflict between Somalia and Ethiopia over the Ogaden; the first book of the Blood in the Sun trilogy.
Abdulrazak Gurnah
Born 1948 · Zanzibar, Tanzania
Abdulrazak Gurnah writes about exile, displacement and belonging, often on the East African coast and among people whose stories are rarely told. He left Zanzibar at 18 after the revolution there and arrived in England as a refugee in 1968; he later taught at the University of Kent.
He won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2021 for his “uncompromising and compassionate penetration of the effects of colonialism”. Paradise was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1994, and his novels since include Afterlives (2020) and Theft (2025).
Read Gurnah if you want quiet, precise novels about colonial East Africa.
Start with Paradise (1994). In early twentieth-century East Africa, a boy is pawned to a rich merchant to pay his father’s debt and travels with his caravans into the interior on the eve of the First World War.
Mia Couto
Born 1955 · Beira, Mozambique
Mia Couto, born António Emílio Leite Couto, is a biologist as well as a writer. He writes in Portuguese about Mozambique, and his best-known novel is set during the country’s civil war. The novels listed here were all translated into English by David Brookshaw.
He won the Camões Prize in 2013 and the Neustadt International Prize in 2014. His Sands of the Emperor trilogy begins with Woman of the Ashes (2015; English 2018) and ends with The Drinker of Horizons (2018; English 2023).
Read Couto if you want a novel about war and its aftermath in Mozambique.
Start with Sleepwalking Land (1992). An old man and a boy flee a refugee camp during Mozambique’s civil war and find the notebooks of a dead man on the road; translated by David Brookshaw (2006).
Tsitsi Dangarembga
Born 1959 · Mutoko, Zimbabwe
Tsitsi Dangarembga’s trilogy of novels follows a rural girl from colonial Rhodesia as she tries to build a meaningful life. Through that one life the books look at education, gender, agency and the development and politics of Zimbabwe. She has also published the essay collection Black and Female (2022).
Nervous Conditions won the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize (Africa region) in 1989, and This Mournable Body was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2020. She won the PEN Pinter Prize in 2021. Her 2022 conviction over a peaceful protest was overturned in 2023.
Read Dangarembga if you want a coming-of-age novel about education and ambition.
Start with Nervous Conditions (1988). In 1960s Rhodesia, a girl from a poor family gets the chance to go to a mission school after her brother’s death, and grows close to her cousin. Or This Mournable Body (2018). The third novel in the trilogy, shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2020.
Maaza Mengiste
Born 1974 · Addis Ababa, Ethiopia
Maaza Mengiste writes historical novels about Ethiopia: the revolution of the 1970s in her first book, and Mussolini’s invasion in her second. Her work brings forward people left out of official history, in particular the women who fought in the Italo-Ethiopian War.
The Shadow King was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2020. Her first novel, Beneath the Lion’s Gaze, was runner-up for the Dayton Literary Peace Prize in 2011. She teaches at Wesleyan University.
Read Mengiste if you want war fiction centred on women.
Start with The Shadow King (2019). In 1935, as Italy invades Ethiopia, a young woman becomes guard to a peasant disguised as the exiled emperor and inspires other women to fight. Or Beneath the Lion’s Gaze (2010). Her first novel, about a family during the Ethiopian Revolution.
Leïla Slimani
Born 1981 · Rabat, Morocco
Leïla Slimani writes in French about desire, class, domestic life and violence, and more recently about her own family’s history in Morocco. Her trilogy beginning with The Country of Others follows her maternal grandparents through Moroccan decolonisation in the 1950s.
Lullaby (published in the US as The Perfect Nanny) won the Prix Goncourt in 2016. Her books are translated into English by Sam Taylor, and the final volume of the trilogy, I’ll Take the Fire, appeared in English in 2026.
Read Slimani if you want a tense, short literary thriller.
Start with Lullaby (2016). A Parisian couple hire a nanny who wins the family over, until her mental state deteriorates and she kills their two children; translated by Sam Taylor (2018). Or The Country of Others (2020). The first volume of her trilogy about her grandparents in 1950s Morocco; translated by Sam Taylor (2022).
Which African author should you read first?
The best starting point depends on what you want from a book.
- For a family saga — Naguib Mahfouz, Palace Walk (1956)
- For a short first read — Mariama Bâ, So Long a Letter (1979)
- For colonialism and its aftermath — Tayeb Salih, Season of Migration to the North (1966)
- For a Nobel laureate — Abdulrazak Gurnah, Paradise (1994)
- For a coming-of-age novel — Tsitsi Dangarembga, Nervous Conditions (1988)
- For a literary thriller — Leïla Slimani, Lullaby (2016)
Where to go next
Frequently asked questions
Which African authors have won the Nobel Prize in Literature?
On this list, Naguib Mahfouz won in 1988 and Abdulrazak Gurnah in 2021. Wole Soyinka, the first African laureate (1986), appears on the Nigerian authors page.
What is a good first African novel to read?
So Long a Letter by Mariama Bâ and Season of Migration to the North by Tayeb Salih are both short and widely available in English. Nervous Conditions by Tsitsi Dangarembga is another accessible starting point.
Which languages are these books translated from?
Mahfouz and Salih wrote in Arabic, Bâ, Djebar and Slimani in French, and Couto in Portuguese. Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o switched from English to Gikuyu after 1977; the others on this list write in English.
Why are there no Nigerian or South African writers on this list?
Both countries have their own pages, so this list concentrates on the rest of the continent. Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie are on the Nigerian authors page.
Which African novels have been shortlisted for the Booker Prize?
From this list, Abdulrazak Gurnah’s Paradise was shortlisted in 1994, and Tsitsi Dangarembga’s This Mournable Body and Maaza Mengiste’s The Shadow King were both shortlisted in 2020.
Who are the best African women writers?
Mariama Bâ, Assia Djebar, Ama Ata Aidoo, Tsitsi Dangarembga, Maaza Mengiste and Leïla Slimani are all on this list. Their books deal with marriage, education, war and colonial history from women’s points of view.
Start with the author whose questions interest you most. The book you remember longest may not be the one with the clearest answers, but the one that changes how you see something familiar.
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