A renowned Ghanaian author and advocate of women's rights, Ama Ata Aidoo has been confirmed dead in a statement released by her family.
She died after a brief illness at 81.
Before her demise, Ata Aidoo was one of Africa's most celebrated authors and playwrights, whose famous works include: The Dilemma of a Ghost, Our Sister Killjoy and Changes.
She fought against what she called a "Western perception of the African female as a downtrodden wretch."
She was also her country’s education minister in the early 1980s but resigned when she was unable to make education free.
The statement released by her family reads: "our beloved relative and writer" passed away after a short illness, requesting privacy to allow them to grieve, BBC reports.
Ata Aidoo, a university professor, earned numerous literary accolades for her novels, plays, and poetry, including the Commonwealth Writers Prize in 1992 for Changes, a love story about a statistician who divorces her first husband and joins into a polygamist marriage.
Her plays, such as Anowa, have been read in classrooms across West Africa, alongside works by other greats such as Wole Soyinka and Chinua Achebe.
She influenced a new generation of writers, including Nigeria's award-winning Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.
In a statement, her family said "our beloved relative and writer" passed away after a short illness, requesting privacy to allow them to grieve, BBC reports.
A university professor, Ata Aidoo won many literary awards for her novels, plays and poems, including the 1992 Commonwealth Writers Prize for Changes, a love story about a statistician who divorces her first husband and enters into a polygamist marriage.
Her work, including plays like Anowa, have been read in schools across West Africa, along with works of other greats like Wole Soyinka and Chinua Achebe.
She was a major influence on the younger generation of writers, including Nigeria's awarding-winning Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.
In a piece about the Ghanaian in The Africa Report publication in 2011, Adichie wrote: "When I first discovered Ama Ata Aidoo's work - a slim book on a dusty shelf in our neighbour's study in Nsukka [in south-eastern Nigeria] - I was stunned by the believability of her characters, the sureness of her touch and what I like to call, in a rather clunky phrase, the validating presence of complex femaleness.
"Because I had not often seen this complex femaleness in other African books I had read and loved, mine was a wondrous discovery: of Anowa, tragic and humane and many dimensional, in Aidoo's play set in the 1800s in Fantiland; of Sissie, the self-assured, perceptive main character of the ambitious novel Our Sister Killjoy, who wryly recounts her experiences in Germany and England in the 1960s; or of the varied female characters in No Sweetness Here, my favourite of Aidoo's books."
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