Amos Tutuola

Amos Tutuola was a Nigerian writer, born in 1920 near Abeokuta and died in 1997, known for fiction that draws heavily on Yoruba folklore and oral storytelling traditions. Born to Yoruba Christian cocoa-farming parents and having received only about six years of formal schooling, he wrote in an unconventional, orally inflected English that drew both acclaim and controversy on first publication. He is best known for his debut novel The Palm-Wine Drinkard (1952), which follows a man's journey into the world of the dead to retrieve his palm-wine tapster, a work that brought him international recognition and established him as a significant, if singular, figure in the emergence of modern African literature in English.