Amos Tutuola was born in Abeokuta, Nigeria, in 1920. The son of a cocoa farmer, he attended several schools before training as a blacksmith. He later worked as a civil servant. His first novel, The Palm-Wine Drinkard, was published in 1952 and brought him international recognition. From 1956 until retirement, he worked for the Nigerian Broadcasting Company while continuing to write. His last book, The Village Witch Doctor and Other Stories, was published in 1990. He died in Ibadan in 1997.

Praise for The Palm-Wine Drinkard:

"Tutuola's art conceals--or rather clothes--his purpose, as all good art must do."--Chinua Achebe

"Bracingly original in its voice and ideas."--Elijah Wolfson, TIME, "The 100 Best Fantasy Books of All Time"

"What I love about The Palm-Wine Drinkard is how its language simultaneously has the sophistication of Joyce and the stammering of an actual drunk . . . It's all over the place. The syntax is utterly uncanny and strange. The structure is deeply disorienting. It's just so radically itself . . . [Tutuola] doesn't sound like anyone else. He sounds like himself. He sounds like his own utterly unprecedented experience of life on the planet Earth . . . That's the ambition of every writer--to articulate an unprecedented consciousness. And you'd be hardpressed to find anyone who does that better than Tutuola."--Kaveh Akbar, Publishers Weekly

"Brief, thronged, grisly, and bewitching."--Dylan Thomas, The Observer

"That mythic dimension is what I'm most interested in--the way [Tutuola] blends the supernatural world seamlessly with the human reality."--Chigozie Obioma, Financial Times