Achebe is in great demand throughout the world as a speaker and visiting lecturer, and is presently teaching at Bard College in New York.Īchebe uses that most English of literary forms, the novel, to make his story accessible to Westerners, and interlaces the narrative with Igbo proverbs and folktales. In an autobiographical essay, he describes his childhood as being “at the crossroads of cultures.” In the course of a distinguished academic and literary career, much of it in exile, Achebe has been the recipient of many awards, beginning with the Margaret Wrong Memorial Prize in 1959 for Things Fall Apart and including more than thirty honorary doctorates. He spoke Igbo at home and studied English in school, imbibing the dual culture. It also can be a window into the story of the Aborigines in Australia, the Maori of New Zealand, and the First Nations of North, Central, and South America in the “falling apart” of the indigenous cultures of these and other places whose centers could not hold.Ĭhinua Achebe is the ideal teller of this story, born in Nigeria in 1930 and growing up in the Igbo town of Ogidi. But it offers far more than access to pre-colonial Nigeria and the cataclysmic changes brought about by the British. Published in 1958, it is unquestionably the world’s most widely read African novel, having sold more than eight million copies in English and been translated into fifty languages.
Things Fall Apart is acclaimed as the finest novel written about life in Nigeria at the end of the nineteenth century.
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