Armah was born to Fanti-speaking parents in Sekondi-Takoradi, the twin harbour city and capital of the Western Region of Ghana. He had his early education at Achimota School, near Accra, after which he worked as a Radio Ghana scriptwriter, reporter, and announcer. At the age of nineteen he went to the USA as a scholarship student and acquired post-graduate degrees from Harvard and Columbia. His life has been centred on his literary work, especially on the retrieval of the African past for the re-invention of post-colonial Africa.

He has lived and worked in every region of the continent and has taught at universities in North America, including Massachusetts and Wisconsin. A resident of Dakar, Senegal, he combines the writing of fiction with professional translation and university teaching in literature and creative writing. He is perhaps the most provocative and versatile prose stylist of the second generation of anglophone African writers as well as the most significant Ghanaian novelist to date.

In an essentially autobiographical article, 'One Writer's Education' (West Africa, August 1985), Armah identifies himself not simply as an Akan, an Ewe, a Ghanaian, and a West African, but 'most significantly as an African'. His concern to work for change in Africa has made him perhaps not only the most controversial but also the most polemical African writer. In Armah's Africa, revolutionaries are the only creators, an ideological position that has elicited the wrath of both African and foreign critics.