As if this day hasn’t been momentous enough, this evening we are honored to host one of the great writers at work in the world today, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o. Not to jinx him as we move to the annual time of Nobel Literature Prize honors, but he is among those most frequently mentioned for that, the greatest world literary honor. Born and come of age in Kenya, he is the author of major, prize-winning works of fiction, A Grain of Wheat, Petals of Blood, and Wizard of the Crow, among them. He is also the author of powerful nonfiction works, Decolonising the Mind and the recent Secure the Base (Seagull) among those. He is here tonight from southern California where he is Distinguished Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Irvine, with a brilliant memoir of his coming of age as a writer and young man, Birth of a Dream Weaver: A Writer’s Awakening (The New Press).