Chinua Achebe

Early life

Chinua Achebe was born on 16 November 1930 in Ogidi, in eastern Nigeria. His father worked for the Church Missionary Society, and Achebe attended the society's school, beginning to learn English at about eight. At 14 he was one of a small number of boys selected for Government College, Umuahia. In 1948 he entered University College, Ibadan, to study medicine, but switched to English and graduated in 1953.

Broadcaster and novelist

After a year of teaching, Achebe joined the Nigerian Broadcasting Corporation, where he worked for twelve years and became director of external broadcasting for the Voice of Nigeria. His first novel, Things Fall Apart (1958), tells of an Igbo community's encounter with colonial rule and missionaries. It was followed by No Longer at Ease (1960), Arrow of God (1964) and A Man of the People (1966); much later came Anthills of the Savannah (1987). Brown University reports that Things Fall Apart has sold more than 12 million copies in English and been translated into some 50 languages.

From 1962 to 1972 Achebe was founding editor of Heinemann's African Writers Series, which brought a generation of African authors to international readers. He also founded the literary journal Okike.

Biafra

When the Eastern Region declared itself the independent state of Biafra in 1967, Achebe spent much of the ensuing 30-month civil war travelling in Europe and North America on Biafra's behalf. In those years he turned to poetry and short fiction; his collection Beware, Soul-Brother won the Commonwealth Poetry Prize in 1972. He returned to the war decades later in There Was a Country: A Personal History of Biafra (2012).

Critic and teacher

On 18 February 1975, at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, Achebe delivered "An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad's Heart of Darkness," arguing that Joseph Conrad's celebrated novel dehumanised Africans. Later published in the Massachusetts Review, the lecture became a landmark in debates over how the West depicts Africa.

After a 1990 car crash left him partly disabled, Achebe settled in the United States, teaching for many years at Bard College in New York; the Poetry Foundation adds that he faced threats from Nigeria's military government. In 2009 he joined Brown University as the David and Marianna Fisher University Professor and professor of Africana studies, where he convened an annual colloquium on Africa. He won the Man Booker International Prize in 2007.

Legacy

Achebe died in Boston on 21 March 2013, aged 82. Scholars such as Dartmouth's Ayo Coly have called him the inventor or "father" of modern African literature, crediting him with taking the European novel and remaking it to express African experience. Many writers regarded him as the godfather of their generation.