Chinua Achebe: Tributes & Reflections

Chinua Achebe: Tributes & Reflections
Sunday 13 July, 14:45 – 15:30
BL Conference Centre, FREE

A tribute to the father of contemporary African literature marking the launch of Chinua Achebe: Tributes & Reflections with editors Nana Ayebia Clarke and James Currey. Chaired by Maya Jaggi, cultural journalist and critic.

The news of Chinua Achebe’s death in the US on 22 March 2013, in the middle of the 39th Annual African Literature Association Conference in Charleston, South Carolina, sent shock waves through the literary communities across the world. Renowned as Africa’s most famous novelist and the founding father of modern African writing in English, Chinua Achebe’s literary life spanned over fifty years with the publication of his first novel Things Fall Apart under the Heinemann imprint of the African Writers Series, and the publication of There Was A Country: A Personal History of Biafra (2012), his memoir of the Nigeria Biafra war in the 1960s. In this collection of essays, Nobel Laureates Wole Soyinka, Toni Morrison and Nadine Gordimer lead an international chorus of tributes to Chinua Achebe’s writing and legacy. The volume features 49 contributors and includes a host of other distinguished writers, critics, scholars and publishers all paying tribute to Achebe’s life and work, anchoring it within his activism and mediatory role as a great spokesman and defender of Africa.