Chinua Achebe
Chinua Achebe (1930-2013), born Albert Chinualumgu, was a Nigerian writer and a professor. He was a poet, novelist, critic and essayist considered a leading litterateur of African literature. He was awarded Nobel Prize for Literature in 1989, and several others prizes like Man Booker International Prize, Peace Prize of the German Book Trade and St. Louis Literary Award.His first novel 'Things Fall Apart' (1958) is highly successful. This novel is about the Ibo tribe. 'Things Fall Apart' translated into different forty languages. It is know for addressing political subjects. A man of the People (1966) and Anthills of the Savannah (1988) were his other noteworthy works.
Wisdom & Quotes
- Take care
a dancer disinherited in mid-dance hanging a lame foot in
air like the hen
in a strange unfamiliar compound.
Pray
protest this patrimony to which you must return when the song
is finished and the dancers disperse.
- Beware, Soul Brothers
- They say a man is like a funeral ram which must take whatever beating comes to it without opening its mouth; only the silent tremor of pain down its body tells of its suffering.
- I feel that the English language will be able to carry the weight of my African experience. But it will have to be a new English, still in full communion with its ancestral home but altered to suit new African surroundings.
- As long as one people sit on another and are deaf to their cry, so long will understanding and peace elude all of us.
- After a war life catches
hints of normalcy like
vines entwining a hollow twig.
- After a War, Christmas in Biafra and Other Poems
- People create stories create people; or rather stories create people create stories.
Edward Kamau Brathwaite