THE HISTORY OF CHINUA ACHEBE

 

David and Marianna Fisher University Professor and Professor of Africana Studies

Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe (1930-2013) is known the world over for having played a germinal role in the founding and development of African literature. He is considered among the most significant world writers. He is most well known for the groundbreaking 1958 novel Things Fall Apart, a novel still considered to be required reading the world over. It has sold over twelve million copies and has been translated into more than fifty languages.

Professor Achebe's global significance lies not only in his talent and recognition as a writer, but also as a critical thinker and essayist who has written extensively on questions of the role of culture in Africa and the social and political significance of aesthetics and analysis of the postcolonial state in Africa. He is renowned, for example, for "An Image of Africa," his trenchant and famous critique of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness. Today, this critique is recognized as one of the most generative interventions on Conrad; and one that opened the social study of literary texts, particularly the impact of power relations on 20th century literary imagination.

In addition, Professor Achebe is distinguished in his substantial and weighty investment in the building of literary arts institutions. His work as the founding editor of the Heinemann African Writers Series led to his editing over one hundred titles in it. Achebe also edited the University of Nsukka journal Nsukkascope, founded Okike: A Nigerian Journal of New Writing and assisted in the founding of a publishing house, Nwamife Books–an organization responsible for publishing other groundbreaking work by award-winning writers.

Selected Honors and Awards:

    The Dorothy and Lillian Gish Prize, 2010

    Man Booker International Award, 2007

    1st Living Author presented in the Everyman's Library collection by Alfred A. Knopf,   

     1992

    Rockefeller Fellowship, 1960

    UNESCO Fellowship for Creative Artists, 1960

    Margaret Wrong Prize

    The New Statesman Jock Campbell Prize

    The Commonwealth Poetry Prize

Source: http://brown.edu