Chinua Achebe

He is more commonly known as Chinua Achebe. His father was a teacher in a missionary school. He was educated at the Government College in Umuahia and the University College of Ibadan. After working briefly as a teacher, he joined the Nigerian Broadcasting Company. He later taught in several universities and cofounded a publishing company with Christopher Okigbo. He has taught literature at a university in upstate New York since a car crash in the early 1990s left him in a wheelchair.

Achebe published his first novel, Things Fall Apart, when he was twenty-eight years old. He is also a noted essayist and became famous for his 1977 collection Morning Yet On Creation Day. He has been awarded various literary prizes - see the fact file below for details. In 2007, he won the Man Booker International Prize, a biennial literary award in recognition of lifetime achievement in the field of literature.

Fact file

Name: Chinua Achebe

Education: University College of Ibadan

Date of birth: 1930

Place of birth: Nigeria

Current home: New York

Awards: Margaret Wrong Prize, the New Statesman Jock Campbell Prize, and the Commonwealth Poetry Prize. International Man Booker Prize.

Similar Authors: Ben Okri, Caryl Phillips