American college celebrates Prof. Chinua Achebe
By SUNDAY ANI

Sunday, February 7, 2010
Wellesley College in the United States has lined up series of activities in honour of Nigerian author, Professor Chinua Achebe.


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Achebe



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The three-day event between March 4 and 6, which will be hosted by college’s Newhouse Center for the Humanities, will feature readings, performances and scholarly events in celebration of Achebe’s work.

Winner of the 2007 Man Booker Prize for Fiction, Achebe is best known for his novel, ‘Things Fall Apart’, the most widely read work of African fiction.

He will also deliver the 2010 Wilson Lecture on Friday, March 5 in Houghton Chapel.

Describing Achebe, literary scholar and 2007 Man Booker International Prize chairman, Elaine Showalter, said: “Chinua Achebe inaugurated the modern African novel. He also illuminated the path for writers around the world seeking new words and forms for new realities and societies.”

Director of the Newhouse Centre of the Humanities, Carol Dougherty, said the fifth anniversary of Chinua Achebe's novel No Longer at Ease was at a critical time in politics and literature.

Speaking further she said: “Achebe and his writing have stood astride the crossroads of politics, literature, East and West since the publication of ‘Things Fall Apart’ in 1959, and I am thrilled that the Newhouse Center will host such a prominent group of artists and scholars as they take up the important questions raised by Achebe in his work over the course of the three-day celebration. We are so lucky that Mr. Achebe will be present among us so that we can learn from him, but also that we may honour him as he deserves."

[b]On March 4, there will be a focus on Contemporary Nigerian Fiction from 7 pm, at Clapp Library Lecture Room. It will be an evening of readings by contemporary Nigerian novelists, Helon Habila and Sefi Atta, and Newhouse Visiting Professor of Creative Writing, Colin Channer, will moderate it.

During the Wilson Lecture, on March 5, Achebe will read from selected works, including his recent memoir, ‘The Education of a British-Protected Child.

The annual Wilson Lecture brings some of the most important voices in contemporary society to Wellesley.

Past lecturers have included the Honorable Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg, environmentalist Bill McKibbon, and Lani Guinier, the first woman to receive tenure at Harvard Law School Symposium: No Longer at Ease.

On March 6, the focus will be on literature, politics, and the challenges of Africa at the crossroads at the Collins Cinema.

Achebe has often described himself as a man of more than one tradition African and Western, literary and political. This symposium takes the 50th anniversary of his 1960 novel, ‘No Longer at Ease’, as the point of departure for a multi-disciplinary investigation of African society and its representation in the aftermath of colonization, war, liberation, a new wave of democratization and a new literature to grapple with it all.[/b]

Born in Nigeria in 1930, Achebe was raised in the village of Ogidi, one of the first centers of Anglican missionary work in Eastern Nigeria.

He graduated from the University College of Ibadan in Nigeria.

An early career in radio ended abruptly in 1966 when he left his post as director of external broadcasting in Nigeria during the national upheaval that led to the Biafran War.

He was appointed senior research fellow at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, and began lecturing widely abroad. For 19 years, he was professor of languages and literature at Bard College, and in 2009 he joined the Africana Studies Department at Brown University where he founded the Chinua Achebe Colloquium.

He is the recipient of more than 30 honorary degrees, as well as numerous awards for his work.

In 2004, Achebe declined to accept the title of Commander of the Federal Republic, Nigeria’s second highest honour in protest over the state of affairs in his native country.

In 2007, he won the Man Booker International Prize, which is awarded once every two years to a living author for a body of work that has contributed to an achievement in fiction on the world stage.

Paralyzed from the waist down in a 1990 car accident, he is married to Christie Chinwe Achebe, a visiting Professor of Psychology at Bard, with whom he has four children.