Chinua Achebe

Chinua Achebe grew up in Ogidi, an Igbo town in southeastern Nigeria, where his father taught for the Anglican mission. He went to University College, Ibadan, to study medicine and switched to English, history and theology. After graduation he worked for the Nigerian Broadcasting Service in Lagos. Novels such as Joyce Cary's Mister Johnson, which showed Nigerians as savages or clowns, convinced him that Africans had to tell their own story.

Things Fall Apart (1958) follows Okonkwo, a proud wrestler and farmer in the village of Umuofia, as British missionaries and officials arrive. It shows an Igbo society with its own law, religion and debate. It also shows how Okonkwo's fear of weakness drives him to ruin. The novel became the most widely read work of modern African fiction.

During the Nigerian Civil War, Achebe supported Biafra and served as its envoy abroad. His 1975 lecture "An Image of Africa" called Joseph Conrad a racist and started a long debate. A car crash in 1990 left him partly paralyzed. He taught at Bard College and then at Brown University, and he died in Boston in 2013.