Ahmadou Kourouma was born in 1927 in the small town of Boundiali in the Ivory Coast. As a young man he fought in the French colonial army in Indochina and studied science in France. On returning to the Ivory Coast he worked in insurance, but having fallen foul of the regime was jailed for a number of months and subsequently went into exile. He returned for four years in the early 1970s before leaving the country once more, living in Togo and Cameroon until 1993, when he returned finally to the Ivory Coast. He wrote plays and four novels and was the winner of the Prix Renaudot, the Prix Inter and the Prix Goncourt des Lyc¿s. He died in 2003.