No past, no present, no future

Yulisa Amadu Maddy was a professor, poet, playwright, novelist, and dancer born in Freetown, Sierra Leone in 1936. In 1969, he founded Sierra Leone's Gbakanda Afrikan Tiata theatre company and published a collection of poetry titled New African Prose . The following year, he directed Zambia's national dance troupe in training for Montreal World's Fair. He received the Sierra Leone National Arts Festival Award in 1973, the same year he released his debut novel, No Past, No Present, No Future . He was also awarded the Gulbenkian Grant from the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation in 1978 and an Edinburgh Festival Award in 1979. Maddy was briefly imprisoned and exiled for his political activism in Sierra Leone but returned in 2007 to teach at Freetown's Milton Margai College of Education. He died in 2014.