CAMARA LAYE (1928–1980) was born in Kouroussa, a large village on the river Niger in the French West African colony of Upper Guinea. The Camaras are one of the oldest clans of the Malinke people, and Camara Laye’s father, a goldsmith, was a man of considerable local authority. The eldest of seven children, Camara spent his formative years in Koranic and French elementary schools before winning a scholarship to study automobile engineering in Argenteuil, outside Paris. His precocious first book, the autobiographical novel The Dark Child, was published in France in 1953 to great acclaim; it was followed a year later by his masterpiece, The Radiance of the King. In the late 1950s Camara Laye returned to Africa, where he worked in a variety of official capacities for the government of newly independent Guinea, only to be driven into exile because of his political outspokenness. Though his final years were overshadowed by illness and poverty, Camara Laye completed two additional major works: Dramouss, a continuation of The Dark Child, and The Guardian of the Word, a rendering into French of the great Malian epic Soundiata.

TONI MORRISON is the author of nine novels, among them The Bluest Eye, Beloved, Jazz, and Paradise. Born in Ohio and a graduate of Howard and Cornell, she was the Robert F. Goheen Professor at Princeton from 1989 to 2006. In 1993 she won the Nobel Prize in Literature.

JAMES KIRKUP (1918-2009) was a prolific English poet, translator and travel writer. He became a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1962.