Chinua Achebe

Albert Chinụalụmọgụ Achebe was born on 16 November 1930 in the Igbo town of Ogidi in eastern Nigeria, the son of Isaiah Okafo Achebe, a teacher and Christian evangelist, and Janet Iloegbunam, a blacksmith's daughter. He grew up at a crossroads — Sunday hymns in the mission house, masquerades and proverbs in the village — and it was this double inheritance, neither denied, that would feed all his work. At University College, Ibadan he abandoned medicine for literature, and after graduating in 1953 he joined the Nigerian Broadcasting Corporation.

Reading European novels set in Africa, Achebe was wounded to find his own people cast as a faceless, savage backdrop. His answer was Things Fall Apart (1958), the story of the proud wrestler Okonkwo and the clan of Umuofia as British missionaries and colonial officers arrive. He told it entirely from inside the village, with its laws, festivals and proverbs intact — and he wrote in English bent to the rhythm of Igbo speech, refusing to smooth away either the dignity of his culture or its hard edges. The novel's title came from W. B. Yeats's poem 'The Second Coming'.

The book grew into the most widely read work of African literature ever written — over 20 million copies in 57 languages — and earned Achebe the title 'father of modern African literature'. He never used that fame to flatter. In a 1975 lecture, An Image of Africa, he called Joseph Conrad, author of a celebrated classic, 'a thoroughgoing racist'. During the Nigeria–Biafra war of 1967–70 he served as a roving ambassador for breakaway Biafra and bore witness to its famine and grief.

A car accident in 1990 left him paralysed from the waist down, but it did not stop him: he taught for decades in the United States, became a professor at Brown University, won the Man Booker International Prize in 2007, and in 2012 published his last book, the memoir There Was a Country, before his death in Boston on 21 March 2013. He had said that until lions have their own historians, the history of the hunt will always glorify the hunter — and he had spent his life being a historian for the lions.