Achebe won the Commonwealth poetry prize for his collection Christmas in Biafra, was a finalist for the 1987 Booker prize for his novel Anthills of the Savannah, and in 2007 won the Man Booker international prize. Chair of the judges on that occasion, Elaine Showalter, said he had "inaugurated the modern African novel", while her fellow judge, the South African Nobel laureate Nadine Gordimer, said his fiction was "an original synthesis of the psychological novel, the Joycean stream of consciousness, the postmodern breaking of sequence", and that Achebe was "a joy and an illumination to read".

Nelson Mandela, meanwhile, has said that Achebe "brought Africa to the rest of the world" and called him "the writer in whose company the prison walls came down".

The author is also known for the influential essay An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad's Heart of Darkness (1975), a hard-hitting critique of Conrad in which he says the author turned the African continent into "a metaphysical battlefield devoid of all recognisable humanity, into which the wandering European enters at his peril", asking: "Can nobody see the preposterous and perverse arrogance in thus reducing Africa to the role of props for the break-up of one petty European mind?"


According to Brown University, where Achebe held the position of David and Marianna Fisher university professor and professor of Africana studies until his death, this essay "is recognised 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".

Born in 1930 in Ogidi, in the south-east of Nigeria, the author won a scholarship to the University of Ibadan, and later worked as a scriptwriter for the Nigeria Broadcasting Service. He chose to write Things Fall Apart in English – something for which he has received criticism from authors including Ngugi wa Thiong'o – but Achebe said he felt "that the English language will be able to carry the weight of my African experience. But it will have to be a new English, still in full communion with its ancestral home but altered to suit its new African surroundings".

His fourth novel, 1966's A Man of the People, anticipated a coup that took place in Nigeria just before the book was first published. "I'd ended the book with a coup," Achebe told the Guardian, "which was ridiculous because Nigeria was much too big a country to have a coup, but it was right for the novel. That night we had a coup. And any confidence we had that things could be put right were smashed. That night is something we have never really got over."

His most recent work was last year's mix of memoir and history There Was a Country, an account of the Nigerian civil war of 1967 to 1970.

Achebe was a supporter of Biafran seccession, but after the end of the civil war in 1970 he took what he described as a "sojourn" in politics. There he found that "the majority of people … were there for their own personal advancement", deciding instead to devote himself to academia.

tpia@:
Works

Novels:

Things Fall Apart (1958)

No Longer at Ease (1960)

Arrow of God (1964)

A Man of the People (1966)

Anthills of the Savannah (1987)


Short stories:

Marriage Is A Private Affair (1952)

Dead Men's Path (1953)

The Sacrificial Egg and Other Stories (1953)

Civil Peace (1971)

Girls at War and Other Stories (including "Vengeful Creditor" (1973)

African Short Stories (editor, with C.L. Innes) (1985)

Heinemann Book of Contemporary African Short Stories (editor, with C.L. Innes) (1992)



The Voter


Poetry:

Beware, Soul-Brother, and Other Poems (1971) (published in the US as Christmas at Biafra, and Other Poems, 1973)

Don't let him die: An anthology of memorial poems for Christopher Okigbo (editor, with Dubem Okafor) (1978)

Another Africa (1998)

Collected Poems Carcanet Press (2005)

Refugee Mother And Child

Vultures

Essays, criticism, non-fiction and political commentary:

The Novelist as Teacher (1965) - also in Hopes and Impediments

An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad's "Heart of Darkness" (1975) - also in Hopes and Impediments

Morning Yet on Creation Day (1975)

The Trouble With Nigeria (1984)

Hopes and Impediments (1988)

Home and Exile (2000)

Education of a British protected Child (6 October 2009)

There Was A Country: A Personal History of Biafra, (11 October 2012 )



Children's books:

Chike and the River (1966)

How the Leopard Got His Claws (with John Iroaganachi) (1972)

The Flute (1975)

The Drum (1978)


wiki

KINGwax: Mtcheeeew!
One of the things he failed to achieve was to start another civil war by trying to make his fictional writing real in: there was a country!

alaoeri: Pls save my ignorance who's Achebe & wetin he do for Nigeria?

dgbanj: His book Things fall Apart is also in our syllables here in India