Amos Tutuola

Tutuola had almost no formal education beyond a few years of mission school in western Nigeria, and worked as a metal coppersmith for the Royal Air Force during the Second World War before taking a low-level clerical job with Nigeria's Department of Labour. He wrote The Palm-Wine Drinkard in a few days, by his own account, drawing directly on Yoruba oral folktales he had grown up hearing rather than any literary model.

Sent to London and published there in 1952, the novel's unruly, self-taught English scandalized Nigerian critics who saw it as an embarrassment while British reviewers, including Dylan Thomas, praised its strangeness and vitality. Tutuola kept his day job for years even as further novels followed, and only in later life was he recognized in Nigeria itself as the writer who had opened the door for the generation of Achebe and beyond. He died in Ibadan in 1997.