Foremost
novelist, Prof Chinua Achebe, is dead. He was 82.
A source said he died last night in a hospital in Boston, Massachusetts,
United States.
A source close to the family said the professor had been ill for
a while and was hospitalised in an undisclosed hospital in Boston.
Contacted, spokesperson for Brown University, where Mr. Achebe
worked until he took ill, Darlene Trewcrist, is yet to respond to our enquiries
on the professor’s condition.
Until his death, Prof Achebe was the David and Marianna Fisher
University Professor and Professor of Africana Studies at Brown.
Below
is how the university profiled him on its website.
“Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe is known the world over
for having played a seminal role in the founding and development of African
literature. He continues to be considered among the most significant world
writers. He is most well known for the groundbreaking 1958 novel Things
Fall Apart, a novel still considered to be required reading the world over. It
has sold over twelve million copies and has been translated into more than
fifty languages.
“Achebe’s global significance lies not only in his talent and
recognition as a writer, but also as a critical thinker and essayist who has
written extensively on questions of the role of culture in Africa and the social
and political significance of aesthetics and analysis of the postcolonial state
in Africa. He is renowned, for example, for “An Image of Africa,” his trenchant
and famous critique of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. Today, this
critique is recognized as one of the most generative interventions on Conrad;
and one that opened the social study of literary texts, particularly the impact
of power relations on 20th century literary imagination.
“In addition, Achebe is distinguished in his substantial and weighty
investment in the building of literary arts institutions. His work as the
founding editor of the Heinemann African Writers Series led to his editing over
one hundred titles in it. Achebe also edited the University of Nsukka
journal Nsukkascope, founded Okike: A Nigerian Journal of New
Writingand assisted in the founding of a publishing house, Nwamife Books–an
organization responsible for publishing other groundbreaking work by
award-winning writers. He continues his long-standing work on the development
of institutional spaces where writers can be published and develop creative and
intellectual community.”
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