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Chinua Achebe (B. 1930) Born in Igboland, Nigeria, Albert Chinualumogu Achebe grew up amid the Igbo cultural practices of his people and the influence of Christianity and the Church. He began to write while a student at University College, Ibadan, fuelled by a passion for literature as well as a sense of dissatisfaction with the ways in which African locations were often represented in existing literature in English. His groundbreaking first novel Things Fall Apart (1958) contested many colonialist prejudices concerning African civilizations and peoples. It depicted life in an Ibo village at a period of transition, culminating in the arrival of British missionaries at the turn of the twentieth century, and explored the various responses of the villagers to the challenges of change. Achebe’s subsequent writing extended and expanded his central themes, in works such as No Longer at Ease (1960), Arrow of God (1964) and A Man of the People (1966), while in 1987 he cast a critical eye over post-independence Nigeria in Anthills of the Savannah. In 1962 Achebe helped found Heinemman’s influential African Writers Series, while his 1975 condemnation of Joseph Conrad’s novel Heart of Darkness (1899) in an essay titled ‘Conrad’s Darkness’ caused considerable debate and opened up important questions about the complicity of literary culture with political and racial politics. In 1990 Achebe was seriously injured in a car accident and has since been confined to a wheelchair. Since 1990 he has taught at Bard College, Upstate New York.