Overview
Chinua Achebe was a novelist, essayist and critic whose first novel, Things Fall Apart, became the most widely read African novel of the twentieth century. He was Igbo, born at Ogidi in what is now Anambra State.
Biography
Achebe studied at University College Ibadan and worked at the Nigerian Broadcasting Service before publishing Things Fall Apart in 1958, a novel of Igbo village life and the arrival of missionaries and colonial administration. No Longer at Ease, Arrow of God and A Man of the People followed, and Anthills of the Savannah appeared in 1987.
He edited the African Writers Series for Heinemann, which brought a generation of African novelists into print, and wrote essays that reshaped how European writing about Africa was read, including the lecture on Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness. He served the Biafran side in a civil administrative and diplomatic role during the civil war, and wrote about it late in life in There Was a Country. He taught in Nigeria and the United States, at Nsukka, Bard College and Brown, and won the Man Booker International Prize in 2007. He twice declined a Nigerian national honour, citing the condition of his home region.
Notable achievements
- Published Things Fall Apart in 1958, translated into dozens of languages
- Founding editor of the Heinemann African Writers Series
- Wrote the essay and lecture that reopened critical argument over Conrad's Heart of Darkness
- Awarded the Man Booker International Prize in 2007
Legacy
Achebe is generally credited with establishing that African life could be written from the inside in English without explanation or apology, and his early novels remain school texts across the continent. His political essays, including The Trouble with Nigeria, are still argued over.