The Modern Novel

Biography

Chinua Achebe was born in Ogidi in 1930. His parents were Igbo/Ibo. His father was an Anglican minister and teacher. He attended church school and then won a scholarship to Government College, Umuahia, whose alumni included other future novelists. He then went to University College, Ibadan where he received a B.A. in English. After university he worked in broadcasting for some time. It was reading Joyce Cary‘s Mr. Johnson that he decided to become a writer for, despite his admiration for Cary, he felt that he could not get under the skin of his African. Achebe went to London to the BBC staff school and it was there that the novelist and critic Gilbert Phelps recognised the quality of Things Fall Apart and recommended it for publication. The book was immediately successful and he went on to publish a highly acclaimed series of novels about the Igbo people before, during and after colonisation. He is often considered the Father of the African Novel and was certainly one of the earliest African novelists to attain literary success. He has received numerous awards and honorary degrees. He became a professor at Bard College in upstate New York, where his wife, Christie, is a professor of psychology. In 1990 he was injured in a car accident and paralysed from the waist down. He died in 2013.

Books about Chinua Achebe