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| Chinua Achebe |
Chinua Achebe was one of the world's most renowned and beloved writers. He wrote with great compassion, humour and insight, about subjects as varied as love, war, colonialism and corruption, cultural history and myth, gender politics and education. His novel, Things Fall Apart, is read and studied around the world: it has sold more than 10 million copies and has been translated into 50 languages. Nelson Mandela has praised Achebe as the writer 'in whose company the prison walls fell down.'
Achebe was born in Ogidi in 1930, and graduated from Ibadan University in 1953. He worked as a radio broadcaster until 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 lectured widely abroad. He has travelled widely in East and Central Africa, the USA and Brazil.
As well as his novels, Achebe has published short stories, poetry, essays and children's books. His volume of poetry, Christmas in Biafra, was the joint winner of the first Commonwealth Poetry Prize. His Collected Poems is published by Carcanet.
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| The Collected Poems of Chinua Achebe |
Of his novels, Arrow of God won the New Statesman-Jock Campbell Award, and Anthills of the Savannah was a finalist for the 1987 Booker Prize. He has received over thirty honorary doctorates and numerous honours from around the world, including the Honorary Fellowship of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the Nigerian National Order of Merit. Along with his wife, he taught at Bard College in New York.
Professor Achebe is survived by his wife, four children and three grandchildren.
*BBC: 'Nigerian author Chinua Achebe Dies': http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-21898664
The Guardian: 'Novelist Chinua Achebe dies, aged 82': http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2013/mar/22/novelist-chinua-achebe-dies
Reuters: 'Chinua Achebe, grandfather of African literature, dies aged 82': http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/03/22/us-achebe-death-idUSBRE92L0FD20130322
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