The father of african literature Chinua Achebe is dead

Chinua Achebe is one of the great literary voices of all time. He was also a beloved husband, father, uncle and grandfather, whose wisdom and courage are an inspiration to all who knew him.


A novelist, poet and essayist, Achebe was perhaps best known for his 1958 novel Things Fall Apart, the story of the Igbo warrior Okonkwo and the colonial era, which has sold more than 10m copies around the world and has been published in 50 languages.

Achebe won the Commonwealth poetry prize for his collection Christmas in Biafra, was a finalist for the 1987 Booker prize for his novel Anthills of the Savannah, and in 2007 won the Man Booker international prize. Chair of the judges on that occasion, Elaine Showalter, said he had "inaugurated the modern African novel", while her fellow judge, the South African Nobel laureate Nadine Gordimer, said his fiction was "an original synthesis of the psychological novel, the Joycean stream of consciousness, the postmodern breaking of sequence", and that Achebe was "a joy and an illumination to read".

Nelson Mandela, meanwhile, has said that Achebe "brought Africa to the rest of the world" and called him "the writer in whose company the prison walls came down".

Mr. Achebe, 82, died in the United States where he was said to have suffered from an undisclosed ailment. may his soul rest in perfect peace :(