Chinua Achebe Biography
Chinua Achebe Biography describes a life of influence in African perspective and courage. The Nigerian played an important rule in the way the world looks at Africa.
Chinua Achebe was born on the sixteenth of November nineteen thirty and died on the twenty first of March in twenty thirteen.
His book Things fall apart, is the most widely read book in African literal arts. It sold close to twenty million copies
The follow-up novels No Longer at Ease (1960) and Arrow of God (1964) make up the “African Trilogy”. These books had a central theme of African culture versus Western culture and beliefs.
He was raised in an Igbo tradition and post colonial Christianity. The village of his upbringing was good at storytelling, so Chinua benefited from his parents’ story telling from an young age.
Achebe was relentless in criticizing the way European literal arts painted Africa.
He attended University of Ibadan, where he obtained a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1953.
At University, he dropped his Christian name of Albert to take up Chinua. Chinua is short for Chinualumogo. He read wide and found the depiction of Africa by non-African authors to be a disappointment.
Thereafter, Achebe joined the Nigerian Broadcasting Corporation as a producer of radio talks. He also married Christie Okoli in that space of time. They had four children together.
In 1956, he went to London to attend the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) Staff School.
From there he published his first novel, Things Fall Apart.
Achebe’s works contributes to the way African literature and culture is perceived through his wealth in expressing African literature.
He had a unique way of straight forward writing that is rich in proverbs and oratory.
In Exile: Chinua Achebe biography
Chinua Achebe left the country after civil war broke out in Nigeria, following a successive coup.
In the nineteen nineties, Chinua predominantly lived in the United States.
In this period, Chinua Achebe together with fellow writers Gabriel Okara and Cyprian Ekwensi toured America. They took it upon themselves to inform the world of the political crisis in Nigeria.
He was a Professor of Languages and Literature at Bard College.
At the time of his death, he was Professor of African Studies at Brown University, a role he took since 2009.
By the time he moved to United States, Achebe was partially paralyzed following a car accident in Nigeria. He was on a wheelchair until his death twenty thirteen
Interesting Facts: Chinua Achebe biography
He completed English studies at the University of Ibadan in four years instead of the standard five.
In 1967 he co-founded Citadel Press with famous writer Christopher Okigbo to publish children’s books that are African oriented.
In 2005, Time magazine listed Things Fall Apart in its list of the 100 Best English-language Novels from 1923 to 2005.
Achebe got several awards in his career as well as honorary degrees from thirty universities.
His legacy is celebrated annually at the Chinua Achebe Literary Festival.
South Africa’s anti-apartheid revolutionary leader Nelson Mandela called him a writer “in whose company the prison walls fell down”.
Jacob Zuma has described him as a “colossus of African writing”.
Barack Obama describes his novel Things Fall Apart as “A true classic of world literature . . . A masterpiece that has inspired generations of writers in Nigeria, across Africa, and around the world.”
American novelist Toni Morrison says of Things Fall Apart “African literature is incomplete and unthinkable without the works of Chinua Achebe.”
He won several awards over the course of his writing career, including the Man Booker International Prize (2007) and the Dorothy and Lillian Gish Prize (2010)
