Amma Darko

Amma Darko's novels look at ordinary Ghanaian lives and, again and again, at how women are exploited. Her first book, Beyond the Horizon, was published in Germany before it appeared in English.

Life

She was born in Koforidua in 1956 and raised in Accra. She earned a diploma in Kumasi in 1980 and then worked at the Science and Technology Centre there. She spent part of the 1980s living and working in Germany and later returned to Accra.

Books

Beyond the Horizon (German 1991, English 1995) follows Mara, who joins her husband in Germany unaware he has married a German woman; it deals with illegal migration and prostitution. Spinnweben (1996) and Verirrtes Herz (2000) came out only in German, the latter her first book set entirely in Ghana. Faceless (2003) brings a middle-class woman into contact with street children in the Accra slum known as Sodom and Gomorrah. Not Without Flowers followed in 2007, and she also wrote The Housemaid. Her work is the subject of Vincent O. Odamtten's book Broadening the Horizon and a 2001 doctoral thesis by Louise Allen Zak.