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Ghanaian becomes president of American writers group

Page last updated at Friday, March 13, 2009 7:07 AM // 1 Comment
Prof. Anthony Kwame Appiah

Prof. Anthony Kwame Appiah

A Ghanaian would become the next President of the American center of PEN, a writers’ organaisation, ghanabusinessnews.com has learnt. He is expected to be elected to the position next week for a one-year term.

Prof. Kwame Anthony Appiah, who is a Laurance S. Rockefeller University Professor of Philosophy at Princeton University, is a writer. He has written three novels and edited numerous nonfiction books.

54-year-old Prof. Appiah is from a family of renowned academics and writers. He is the son of Joe Appiah, a lawyer and politician, who was also, at various times, a Member of Parliament, an Ambassador and a President of the Ghana Bar Association, and Peggy Appiah, the novelist and children’s writer. Both parents are deceased.

According to PEN’s executive vice president, Laurence J. Kirshbaum, Prof. Appiah would succeed author Francine Prose, who had served two one-year terms.

Prof. Appiah is recognized as a world traveler immersed in everything from ethics to racial identity, who has written often about Africans and African-Americans and set his fiction in England and Italy.

Born in London, Prof. Appiah had lived for many years in Ghana, before moving on to a career in teaching abroad.

Some of his achievements include been elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society.

He was inducted in 2008 into the American Academy of Arts and Letters; and he has served on the boards of the PEN American Center, the National Humanities Center and the American Academy in Berlin.
He is currently a trustee of Ashesi University College in Accra, Ghana.

He has honorary degrees from the University of Richmond, (2000), Colgate University (2003) Bard College (2004), Fairleigh Dickinson University (2006) and Swarthmore College (2006), and received the degree of Honorary Doctor of Philosophy in May 2008 from Dickinson College, where he gave the Commencement Address in the pouring rain.

In the fall of 2008, he was awarded the first Joseph B. and Toby Gittler Prize by Brandeis University for “outstanding and lasting scholarly contributions to racial, ethnic and/or religious relations.”

By Emmanuel K. Dogbevi



Comments

1 Comment

  1. Agyemang kyeretwie says:
    March 15, 2010 at 6:19 pm

    I want to be a writer,can you help me

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