Syl Cheney-Coker

Syl Cheney-Coker is a Sierra Leonean poet, novelist, and journalist born on June 28, 1945, in Freetown, known for his extensive work on exile and the African diaspora. He won the 1991 Commonwealth Writers Prize (Africa Region) for his novel The Last Harmattan of Alusine Dunbar and has published acclaimed poetry collections including Concerto for an Exile and Stone Child and Other Poems. Educated in the United States at the Universities of Oregon and Wisconsin, he has taught at universities in the Philippines, Nigeria, and the U.S., and spent much of his life in exile before returning to divide his time between Sierra Leone and the United States.