Of his novels, Arrow of God won the New Statesman-Jock Campbell Award, and Anthills of Savannah was a finalist for the 1987 Booker Prize. His volume of poetry Christmas in Biafra and Other Poems, written during the Biafran War, was the joint winner of the first Commonwealth Poetry Prize. Achebe was professor of English at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and also taught for one year at the University of Connecticut, Storrs. He was appointed senior research fellow at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, and began lecturing widely abroad.įrom 1972 to 1975, and again from 1987 to 1988, Mr. Achebe had an early career in radio that ended abruptly in 1966, when he left his post as director of external broadcasting in Nigeria during the national upheaval that led to the Biafran War. Achebe’s writing crackles with life through animated dialogue, laugh-out-loud humour and clever turns of phrase that bring together both Igbo and English words. While widening colonial definitions of culture and literarature, Mr. His canonical first novel, Things Fall Apart (1958), provides a counter-narrative to colonial notions of Africa as a savage place devoid of culture before the arrival of the white man. He is often cited as a major influence by the upcoming generation of African writers including, Helon Habila, Tsitsi Dangarembga and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. He was raised in the large village of Ogidi, one of the first centers of Anglican missionary work in eastern Nigeria, and is a graduate of University College, Ibadan.Ĭited in the London Sunday Times as one of the “1,000 Makers of the Twentieth Century” for defining “A modern African literature that was truly African” and thereby making “a major contribution to the world literature,” Chinua Achebe has published novels, short stories, essays and children’s books. Chinua Achebe was born in Nigeria in 1930.