内容摘要：The BBC has approached the authorities in UAE for a response to the allegation.

The BBC has approached the authorities in UAE for a response to the allegation.

"My own family has become one of my literary rivals," Ngũgĩ joked in a 2020His son, Mukoma wa Ngũgĩ, has alleged that his mother was physically abused by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o.

"Some of my earliest memories are me going to visit her at my grandmother’s where she would seek refuge," his son wrote in a social media post, which Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o did not respond to.Later in his life, Ngũgĩ's health deteriorated. He had triple heart bypass surgery in 2019 and began to struggle with kidney failure. In 1995, he was diagnosed with prostate cancer and given three months to live.Ngũgĩ recovered, however, adding cancer to the lengthy list of struggles he had overcome.

But now one of African literature's guiding lights - as Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie once called him - is gone, leaving the world of words a little darker.Folk band The Wurzels have released a new single written by artificial intelligence (AI) called Wurzel Me Up.

The Somerset band, best known for songs such as The Combine Harvester and I Am A Cider Drinker, said they had decided to use the technology as they had not written a song for a while.

Singer Pete Budd, 84, said: "We realised that it was a long time since we had written a new pop tune. We needed some 'cutting-hedge' technology."Almost everyone who arrives by small boat claims asylum - they made up a third of all asylum applications over the past 12 months. Another large group of claimants were people already in the UK who had overstayed their visas.

The asylum process determines whether a person can remain in the UK because they have a "well-founded fear of persecution" in their home country.Since 2020, the government has been increasingly reliant on hotels, partly because the supply of other types of asylum accommodation has not kept up with the numbers arriving in small boats.

But using asylum hotels is expensive -As of 20 May, 12,748 people had arrived in the UK in small boats - up by nearly a third compared with this time last year.