Ama Ata Aidoo

Launched in March 2017, the Ama Ata Aidoo Centre for Creative Writing (Aidoo Centre), under the auspices of the Kojo Yankah School of Communications Studies at the African University College of Communications (AUCC) in Adabraka, Accra, was named in her honour—the first centre of its kind in West Africa, with Nii Ayikwei Parkes as its director.

She is the subject of a 2014 documentary film, The Art of Ama Ata Aidoo, made by Yaba Badoe.

Aidoo was a patron of the Etisalat Prize for Literature (alongside Dele Olojede, Ellah Wakatama Allfrey, Margaret Busby, Sarah Ladipo Manyika and Zakes Mda), created in 2013 as a platform for African writers of debut books of fiction. She obtained a Fulbright Scholarship award in 1988 and Mbari press short story prize.

Aidoo is the editor of the 2006 anthology African Love Stories. In 2012, she launched Diplomatic Pounds & Other Stories a compilation of short stories and another which is a collection of essays by renowned writers in Ghana, Africa and the African Diaspora.

In 2000 she founded the Mbaasem Foundation, a non-governmental organization based in Ghana with a mission "to support the development and sustainability of African women writers and their artistic output", which she runs together with her daughter Kinna Likimani and a board of management.

Many of Aidoo's other protagonists are also women who defy the stereotypical women's roles of their time, as in her play Anowa. Her novel Changes won the 1992 Commonwealth Writers' Prize for Best Book (Africa). She is also an accomplished poet—her collection Someone Talking to Sometime won the Nelson Mandela Prize for Poetry in 1987—and has written several children's books.

Aidoo has received several awards including the 1992 Commonwealth Writers' Prize for Best Book (Africa) for her novel Changes.

In London in 1986, she delivered the Walter Rodney Visions of Africa lecture organised by the support group for Bogle-L'Ouverture publishing house. Aidoo taught various English courses at Hamilton College in Clinton New York, in the early mid-1990s. She is currently a visiting professor in the Africana Studies Department at Brown University.

She contributed the piece "To be a woman" to the 1984 anthology Sisterhood Is Global: The International Women's Movement Anthology, edited by Robin Morgan. Her story "Two Sisters" appears in the 1992 anthology Daughters of Africa, edited by Margaret Busby.

Ama was appointed Minister of Education under the Provisional National Defence Council in 1982. She resigned after 18 months, realising that she would be unable to achieve her aim of making education in Ghana freely accessible to all. She has portrayed the role of African women in contemporary society. She has opined that the idea of nationalism has been deployed by recent leaders as a means of keeping people oppressed. She has criticized those literate Africans who profess to love their country but are seduced away by the benefits of the developed world. She believes in a distinct African identity, which she views from a female perspective.

Her works of fiction particularly deal with the tension between Western and African world views. Her first novel, Our Sister Killjoy, was published in 1977 and remains one of her most popular works. It is notable for portraying a dissenting perspective on sexuality in Africa and especially LGBT in Africa. Whereas one popular idea on the continent is that homosexuality is alien to Africa, and an intrusion of the ideas of Western culture into a pure, inherently heterosexual "African" culture, Aidoo portrays the main character of Killjoy as indulging in lesbian fantasies of her own, and maintaining sympathetic relationships with lesbian characters.

Aidoo's plays include The Dilemma of a Ghost, produced at Legon in 1964 (first published 1965) and Pittsburgh in 1988, and Anowa, published in 1971 and produced in London in 1991.

Aidoo attended Wesley Girls' Senior High School in Cape Coast, from 1961 to 1964. After high school, she enrolled at the University of Ghana, Legon where she obtained the degree of Bachelor of Arts in English and also wrote her first play, The Dilemma of a Ghost, in 1964. The play was published by Longman the following year, making Aidoo the first published African woman dramatist.

Ama Ata Aidoo, née Christina Ama Aidoo (born 23 March 1942) is a Ghanaian author, poet, playwright and academic. She was the Minister of Education under the Jerry Rawlings administration. In 2000, she established the Mbaasem Foundation to promote and support the work of African women writers.

Aidoo was born on 23 March 1942 in Saltpond in the Central Region of Ghana. Some sources including Megan Behrent, Brown University, and Africa Who's Who have stated that she was born on 31 March 1940. She had a twin brother, Kwame Ata.