Award-winning Kenyan author becomes first African to win South Korean book award

Award-winning Kenyan Ngugi wa Thiong'o has just clinched the 6th edition of the Pak Kyong-ni Literature Award, a South Korean literature prize, making him the first African to win the book prize.

Announcing the results, the Toji Cultural Centre and Pak Kyong-ni Literature Award Review Committee praised Prof Ngugi for his incisive writing on Kenya's independence struggle as well as social and cultural issues.

"The writer deeply and fiercely examined and agonised over situations where various boundaries including the West and the non-West, and modernity and pre-modernity overlap," the committee said in a statement as published in The Nation Kenya.

Valued at $89,300 (about 44 million Naira), the prize was established in 2011 in honour of Pak Kyong-ni (1926-2008), one of South Korea's most renowned writers.

Thiong'o will be awarded on October 22 at the Pak Kyong-ni Literature Festival.

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