Chinua Achebe To Receive One Of The Largest Awards In The Arts

Posted: September 24, 2010 - 17:14
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caption: Prof. chinua Achebe





Gish Prize Press Release




New York — Chinua Achebe, one of the world's most influential authors, has been chosen to receive the 2010 Dorothy and Lillian Gish Prize. With approximately $300,000 from silent film stars Dorothy and Lillian Gish, the Gish Prize is one of the largest and most prestigeous awards in the arts.


Gish Prize recipients are nominated by the worldwide arts community and selected for their unprecedented impact in their chosen fields.


Achebe will receive the prize and a silver medallion on October 27, 2010, at the Hudson Theatre, Millennium Broadway, New York City. Leaders of the arts including curator Lowery Sims, former NEA chair Jane Alexander, PEN president Kwame Anthony Appiah, author Ekwueme Michael Thelwell, poet Sonia Sanchez, and musician Baba Ola Jagun will be among the presenters and guests celebrating Achebe's work and his impact on the international diaspora of African fiction and voices.


"When I was a boy, growing up in Nigeria, becoming a novelist was a far-away dream," says Achebe. "Now it is a reality for many African writers, not just myself. The Gish Prize recognizes the long journey my fellow colleagues and I have taken, and I am proud and grateful for that."


Now in its 17th year, the annual Gish Prize continues to reflect the spirit of the pioneering Gish sisters, paying tribute to artistic trailblazers who have redefined their craft. Gish Prize recipients have shaped the cultural landscape in drama, music, dance, art, architecture, lighting design, film, and literature.Achebe joins an impressive list of past Gish Prize winners including Robert Redford, Ornette Coleman, Merce Cunningham and Frank Gehry. (Full list of Gish Prize recipients below.)


Achebe was selected by the Gish Prize Committee, which this year includes Lowery Sims, curator, Museum of Arts and Design; The Honorable Jane Alexander, actor and former chair of the National Endowment for the Arts; Kwame Anthony Akroma-Ampim Kusi Appiah, president of PEN and Laurance S. Rockefeller University Professor of Philosophy and the University Center for Human Values, Princeton University; Vallejo Gantner, artistic director, Performance Space 122; and Elizabeth Streb, Streb Laboratory for Action Mechanics (S.L.A.M.).


"With the creation of the Trust, Dorothy and Lillian Gish were ensuring, encouraging and elevating what they hold dear and consider essential for artists and audiences alike," says Lisa Philp, managing director and head of philanthropic services, JPMorgan Private Bank, trustee for the Dorothy and Lillian Gish Prize Trust. "The legacy of the Gish Prize is its devotion to the continuing power of the creative spirit. JPMorgan Chase is proud to be a part of this legacy.

Continue here http://saharareporters.com/art-life/chinua-achebe-receive-one-largest-awards-arts

Very nice!

Chinua Achebe, a brilliant man!

Very well deserved to an excellent foresight man

Is Chinua Achebe involved in any charities in Nigeria? What will he be doing with 300K at almost 80 years? I know his kids are doing very well. Just curious

Congratulations to Achebe. Very much deserved.


However I wonder if people know that awarding the prize to someone of Achebe's stature actually does more to increase the prestige of the prize than anything else, Granted, all of the previous winners are distinguished and accomplished and some, like Bob Dylan, Frank Gehry, Ingmar Bergmann, Arthur Miller, and Isabel Allende, are household names in some parts, but the truth is of all the previous winners only Bergmann and maybe to a lesser extent, Miller, Gehry and Allende, are people whose works might be studied a hundred years from now as Achebe's certainly will be.

Forget the gash prize or whatever. the west should give him the Nobel NOW that he's still alive and eligible.
The GASH gains a lot more from Achebe's pedigree than he gains from the prize, cash and all!

@ akin egba. This is good news. @ the other two envious tribalists: go hug transformers will you?

ziddy:

Forget the gash prize or whatever. the west should give him the Nobel NOW that he's still alive and eligible.
The GASH gains a lot more from Achebe's pedigree than he gains from the prize, cash and all!

That's not likely to happen, really, if they meant to they would have already instead of many of the comparative lightweights they've been giving it to for a while now. Although in pure literary talent he is far more deserving than people like Elfriede Jelinek, Dario Fo, Naguib Mahfouz, Derek Walcott, and MANY of the Swedish winners, his habit of confronting the west doesn't endear him to a western based prize.

Take for example his criticism of Joseph Conrad's racism, or his statement when asked why he hasn't won it that "My position is that the Nobel Prize is important. But it is a European prize. It's not an African prize"


There is his implicit anti-Western stance:

Read the bolded

The complete review's Review (from http://www.complete-review.com/reviews/achebec/consca.htm):

      Conversations with Chinua Achebe collects, in chronological order, interviews with Chinua Achebe from nearly four decades. Editor Bernth Lindfors does an admirable job of avoiding too much overlap, and so the same questions are not found over and over and the collection does constantly offer new and different perspectives.
      The last interview (from 1995) actually is among the more useful, in providing some of Achebe's personal and family background in more detail than found elsewhere, but the sum of the interviews does offer a good, fairly rounded picture of Achebe as both man and writer.
      There are major omissions: only one interview really discusses the important magazine founded and headed by Achebe, Okike, for example. In addition, Achebe was editor of the ground-breaking Heinemann African Writers Series between 1962 and 1972 and there is almost no discussion of what his duties involved or to what extent he was able to shape that particular list -- something many readers likely would be very interested in.
      Jumping across the years, most of the major books are discussed in some depth in at least one interview -- though often (his children's books, his poetry, and especially his attempts at drama) too little is made of them and too little is said about them.
      There is some sense of Achebe's progression as a writer, and especially the difficulty he had in re-situating himself (especially as a fiction-writer) after the catastrophic Biafran war. He also emerges as the enthusiastic teacher he is, a true literary leader convinced of the significance of this art and trying to convince others of it.
      Throughout there are interesting insights and observations, from simple matters of craft to larger political issues.
      Some observations are not completely new or surprising, yet nevertheless carry additional weight coming from Achebe:

         This is why I do not paint white characters that are complete blackguards, because I don't think that is necessary for them to do the harm that they did. They were decent people with families, and that is the worst kind of danger: when it comes from a decent man. It does not really excite me that a monster causes trouble. When an ordinary man causes havoc, that is more ominous.

      The question of writing in English (or other colonial tongues) or native languages is broached several times. Of particular interest here is Achebe's recognition that writing for the stage requires "a different convention from the novel", and that part of its immediacy and its "direct, almost participatory form" requires that the characters speak in the language they would speak in real life (whereas in a novel "you accept the whole thing is make-believe" in a different way, filtering it already through the printed words on the page). Interestingly, Achebe mentions wanting to write a play (in Igbo) several times, but he apparently never did so (but unfortunately the reader is never told where or why he failed in this undertaking).
      As he writes in numerous of his essays (see, for example Morning Yet on Creation Day (and our review)), Achebe also recognizes the importance of the critic in maintaining a literary culture and fostering literary debate, and he often laments the lack of a widespread critical culture in Africa:

          I do think what you need is a fair number of indigenous critics who are on the ball because they see literature as a serious matter (our people do not take it seriously enough; I think we are too complacent). (, ) And yet there is not enough dedication and diligence among our own critics. I'm looking forward to a change in this for it is absolutely important. If literature is important, then criticism of literature is also important, and we should get more and more people who are ready to read the books.

      By 1987 he also laments about the general state of even just the possibility of literary appreciation in Nigeria:

   Students in Nigeria are having more and more trouble simply being literate, being able to read extensively. To many students, coming to the university, reading a novel is a huge chore. To plow through a novel is intimidating to many of them. (, ) So you have to coax them into literature.

      At least Achebe is a towering figure who can make literature appear approachable -- if anyone can coax, then surely it is him (though for a long time now he has been teaching in the US and not in Africa). It is sad that despite successful authors (and forceful figures) such as Achebe and despite a relatively rich recent literary tradition, literary culture has not been able to establish itself more firmly in Nigeria.
      Achebe does discuss a few other authors and influences, but the drawback of the interview-form is that it does not lend itself to more in-depth examination of many of these interesting questions. Still, Christopher Okigbo is a prominent presence, and there are some interesting comments about authors such as Ayi Kwei Armah and V.S.Naipaul -- such as:

   I do admire Mr. Naipaul, but I am rather sorry for him. He is too distant from a viable moral centre; he withholds his humanity; he seems to place himself under a self-denying ordinance, as it were, suppressing his genuine compassion for humanity. His style is all too perfect, steel-bright, metallic, and so forth.

      A few years later the judgement is more succinct: Naipaul's is "the case of a brilliant writer who sold himself to the West." Interestingly, Achebe presciently adds (this in 1985): "And one day he'll be 'rewarded' with maybe a Nobel Prize or something."

      In these Conversations with Chinua Achebe one wishes for more: more about his personal life, more about who and what he reads (and what he thinks about them), more about his creative turn after the Biafran war, -- and much more. Still, the conversations collected here do provide a good deal of information and some valuable new insight (especially into Achebe's novels). Given the absence of any true autobiography (or biography) this collection does help fill a void, and is surely of interest to those familiar with Achebe and his work. (Those who haven't read any of Achebe's fiction will find it of considerably less interest.)






His honesty might have done him in. But no real man would sacrifice their integrity and their honesty and straightforwardness in the hopes of winning some prize. Anyways, he's already immortal, so he doesn't need to worry about recognition.

Really though they should give it to him, whatever misgivings they might have about his supposed antagonism to the west. If Doris Lessing can win it for an overrated "classic" like The Golden Notebook, Achebe should win it for Things Fall Apart alone.


If Wole Soyinka can win it for The Man Died, Death and the King's Horseman, and some of his other plays, Achebe should certainly win it for the standouts in his collected opus.

komando7:

@ akin egba. This is good news. @ the other two envious tribalists: go hug transformers will you?

? Can you read, where did you see even one tribalistic comment in this thread? Or is that your instinctive reaction to every thread now? Stop obsessing over actual tribalistic threads and comments and you won't imagine tribalism everywhere.

What makes you feel that Chinua Achebe is interested in nobel prize for literature?.

@ physics
You think some of us can't read through subterranian tribalistic messages. Think again bro. Your obssession with Igbo envy may have made it a subconcious part of your worldview, hence your last statement. The Gish award is good news. Chikena!

komando7:

@ physics
You think some of us can't read through subterranian tribalistic messages. Think again bro. Your obssession with Igbo envy may have made it a subconcious part of your worldview, hence your last statement. The Gish award is good news. Chikena!

Don't be daft. I've seen enough of your back-and-forths on here with actual tribalists to know your mind doesn't go much further than this whole attack-and-defend mentality, but neither you nor anyone could point to any so-called "Igbo envy" in any post in this thread. My clear statement of the fact that the Gish award is benefiting more from having an icon like Achebe associated with the prize than he is benefiting by getting it must have gone over your head, or you don't even know the meaning of the word envy. I'm done. I wont even respond to you any further.

@ Andre Uweh, nobody thinks that he wants the Nobel prize as he has never said anything to that effect, rather it is the case that many people want him to win it, as he is widely considered the best African writer and one of greatest living writers of our time, just google "Achebe Nobel" and you'll see what I mean.

I actually don't think Chinua Achebe cares about the Nobel Prize. The reason being is that his book is one of the most widely read book written by an African man. "Things Fall Apart" is required reading in many states in America. My little sister, had to read the book when she went to high school in America.

I have "googled" Nobel and Achebe, and it seems like politics is being played to deny him that right. He is more than qualified to have the Nobel Prize in Literature.


In 1988 Achebe was asked by a reporter for Quality Weekly how he felt about never winning a Nobel prize; he replied: "My position is that the Nobel Prize is important. But it is a European prize. It's not an African prize, Literature is not a heavyweight championship. Nigerians may think, you know, this man has been knocked out. It's nothing to do with that."

Akin-Egba wants to kidnap an 80yr old man cause of his $300k prize.So what if he's 80?

I would go as far and say that Chinua Achebe is the greatest African author of all time.

Now this man truly deserves to be the[b] Igbo Eze[/b]! May his lineage be blessed for thousands of years.

He deserves every prize he gets. More than BRILLIANT!

PhysicsQED:


Take for example his criticism of Joseph Conrad's racism, or his statement when asked why he hasn't won it that "My position is that the Nobel Prize is important. But it is a European prize. It's not an African prize"

I am sure you are a well-read man, PHYSICSQED.
I know the book you refered to. Yeah! Joseph Conrad's 'Heart of Darkness'.

Chinua Achebe actually called him 'a thoroughgoing racist'.

Chief Achebe is doing Ogidi proud. He is the most modest man God ever created. His family has done wonders for Ogidi town God bless them all.

I would go as far and say that Chinua Achebe is the greatest African author of all time.

no he is not

SEFAGO:

no he is not

Who is?

I wonder if Shakespare won any Noble Prize?

adconline:

I wonder if Shakespare won any Noble Prize?

SMH

Ileke-IdI:

SMH

Ileke, long time.

make sure you visit this thread regularly:

https://www.nairaland.com/nigeria/topic-519155.0.html

ola olabiy:

Ileke, long time.

O tojo meta atabo. Iwo lo salo. lol

ola olabiy:

make sure you visit this thread regularly:

https://www.nairaland.com/nigeria/topic-519155.0.html

LMAO, Yea thanks. I realized my inglishi needed a brush-up.

cool thread tho.

Ileke-IdI:

O tojo meta atabo. Iwo lo salo. lol
LMAO, Yea thanks. I realized my inglishi needed a brush-up.

cool thread tho.

mo salo because i realized you didn't want me.

ola olabiy:

mo salo because i realized you didn't want me.

Or maybe you ran away from me when you saw my wedding ring.

i dey jealous welu welu

ola olabiy:

i dey jealous welu welu

Dont be. . . . when you become rich, we can talk

Ahhhhhhh.
na only love i get for now ooo.
money never boku.

ola olabiy:

Ahhhhhhh.
na only love i get for now ooo.
money never boku.

LMAO!
Well, until then. . . .