Chinua Achebe

Born in Ogidi in colonial Nigeria in 1930, Achebe wrote Things Fall Apart as his debut novel at twenty-seven; it became the most widely read, studied and translated African novel ever written. He is routinely called the father of modern African literature — a label he rejected — for writing Igbo life from the inside, in English, against a century of European caricature. He went on to complete the African Trilogy with No Longer at Ease (1960) and Arrow of God (1964), and died in Boston in 2013.