Ama Ata Aidoo was born in 1942 in southern Ghana to a royal family of the Fante ethnic community, a subgroup of Akan people living primarily in coastal areas of contemporary Ghana. A precocious and ambitious child, she was encouraged to pursue Western education by her family and began writing when she was just fifteen. After attending the University of Ghana, where she studied English literature, she published her first play, The Dilemma of the Ghost, in 1964. The work was published to widespread acclaim, marking Aidoo’s entrance onto the global literary stage and making her the first published female African playwright. Aidoo briefly served as the secretary for education in Ghana and was also a prolific dramatist, essayist, and novelist, as well as an academic and lecturer. At the time of her death in 2023, Aidoo was widely recognized as one of Africa’s most important literary voices.