Chinua Achebe

Chinua Achebe grew up in the Igbo town of Ogidi in eastern Nigeria, the son of early Christian converts, between the church at home and the traditional world of his relatives. He won a scholarship to study medicine at Nigeria's first university and switched to English literature, where the African characters in the books he was given to read were caricatures. He decided that the story would have to be told from inside.

He wrote Things Fall Apart, about an Igbo village in the years the missionaries and colonial officers arrived, while working as a radio producer. In 1957 he sent the only handwritten manuscript to a typing agency in London that had advertised in a magazine, with a fee. Months passed with no reply. It was only when his English boss at the broadcasting service visited London on leave and went to the office in person that the typescript was made and returned. Heinemann printed 2,000 copies in 1958, uncertain whether anyone would buy a novel by an African. It has since sold more than twenty million and been translated into over fifty languages.

He edited the African Writers Series, which put a generation of African authors into print, and served the Biafran side in Nigeria's civil war.

In 1990 a car accident in Nigeria left him paralysed from the waist down. He taught in the United States for the rest of his life, twice refused Nigeria's national honours in protest at its politics, and died in Boston in 2013, aged 82.