Taban Lo Liyong

In February 2020, Lo Liyong was suspended from his teaching assignment by the University of Juba, because he had written critical comments on South Sudan's government in a local South Sudanese newspaper. In a letter to Professor John A. Akec, Vice Chancellor of the University of Juba, 28 US-based academics, including a number of South Sudanese alumni of the University of Juba, expressed their opposition to the suspension.

Liyong has published over twenty books, including Carrying Knowledge Up a Palm Tree (1998), an anthology of poetry that addresses various contemporary issues and follows African progress in recent history. The East African Literature Bureau (EALB) published many of Liyong's earlier works in English, as well as in translation into East African languages.

According to the Encyclopædia Britannica, "Liyong wrote highly imaginative short narratives, such as Fixions (1969), and unorthodox free verse,( ...) His nonfiction output consists of argumentative and amusing personal essays and bold literary criticism (...), presenting challenging new ideas in an original manner."

He was born in Acholiland, then a region of southern Sudan under British rule. After graduation from secondary school in Uganda, he attended the National Teachers College in Kampala, Uganda's capital, before continuing his undergraduate studies at Knoxville College in Tennessee, and postgraduate studies at Howard University. At the University of Iowa Writer's Workshop, he was the first African graduate in 1968. On the completion of his studies in the US, the tyrannical regime of Idi Amin prevented him from returning to Uganda. Instead, he went to neighbouring Kenya and taught at the University of Nairobi. Furthermore, he has also taught at universities in Sudan, South Sudan, Papua New Guinea, Australia, Japan, and South Africa. In collaboration with Henry Owuor-Anyumba and Kenyan writer Ngugi wa Thiong'o, he wrote On the Abolition of the English Department in 1972.

Taban Lo Liyong (born 1939) is a poet, academic and writer of fiction and literary criticism from South Sudan. He was born in Kajo Kaji, Acholiland, in the Equatoria region of southern Sudan, but taken to Uganda at an early age. His political views, as well as his outspoken disapproval of the post-colonial system of education in East Africa, have inspired both further criticism as well as controversy since the late 1960s.