Chinua Achebe

Albert Chinualumogu Achebe was born in 1930 in Ogidi, in eastern Nigeria, the son of a Christian teacher and a family that kept its older Igbo traditions close. He studied medicine and then English at University College, Ibadan, and after teaching worked in broadcasting during the years around Nigerian independence. Things Fall Apart was published in 1958, in the last years of British rule, and it went on to become the most widely read African novel ever written, translated into more than fifty languages. He was the founding editor of the African Writers Series, which published a generation of African authors. A car accident in 1990 left him paralysed from the waist down; he continued to write and taught in the United States. He died in 2013. The tradition and place he wrote from He wrote from Igbo village life and its proverbs, ceremonies and councils, and from the shock of colonial contact. He once framed a truth he often repeated as a proverb: until the lions have their own historians, the history of the hunt will always glorify the hunter. His life's work was to be one of the lions' historians. Genres and style Novels, short stories, essays and criticism. His English is deliberately reworked to carry Igbo rhythm and idiom: plain sentences, proverbs used as dialogue rather than decoration, and a strong sense that a community, not an individual, is the real protagonist. Notable works Things Fall Apart (1958); No Longer at Ease (1960); Arrow of God (1964); A Man of the People (1966); Anthills of the Savannah (1987); the stories of Girls at War (1972); the essays of Morning Yet on Creation Day and Home and Exile. What his craft can teach yours Achebe teaches point of view as an ethical choice. He begins inside Okonkwo's world, so an outsider reader is the guest and must learn the rules, and the arrival of empire is felt as a disturbance in an existing order rather than a beginning of history. He also shows that a proverb spoken by a character can build a whole culture in two lines. Experience Their Writing His fiction is still in copyright, so we describe rather than print it. Things Fall Apart opens with Okonkwo's fame and a wrestling match, and establishes his household, his fears and the values of his village before any English person appears. From the first page, the book is written as though the reader has arrived in a country that already has a long memory. What Makes This Writing Special? Achebe carries Igbo proverb, cadence and courtesy into English without apology or glossary, and writes as someone whose elders are present in the room. His restraint is deliberate: the calm telling is what makes the arriving catastrophe feel earned rather than announced. Detail does the cultural work that no explanation could. Where to Read More Things Fall Apart (1958) and the essays in Home and Exile, and the titles Achebe chose for the African Writers Series.