Charles R. Saunders

Charles Robert Saunders (July 12, 1946 – May 2020) was an African-American author and journalist, a pioneer of the "sword and soul" literary genre with his Imaro novels. Saunders who was born in Pennsylvania, moved to Canada to avoid the draft. He lived initially in Ontario before moving to Nova Scotia where he worked as a civil servant and teacher. In 1989, he started writing a column on Black issues for the Halifax Daily News.

During his long career, he wrote novels, non-fiction, screenplays and radio plays. Notably, he created a fictional continent Nyumbani, where the stories of Imaro, his sword and sorcery series, take place. In 2008, Night Shade Books re-published the second novel in an updated Imaro trilogy The Quest for Cush. In 2017, Saunders released "Nyumbani Tales". In 2018, he published a story of Imaro in the anthology The Mighty Warriors, edited by Robert M. Price.