Set in the 1890s, the first two-thirds of the story steeps you in the ancient ways of Achebe's Igbo people, with their several gods, elaborate ceremonies and hierarchies, and the tough but effective policing mechanisms that force Okonkwo, the subject of the book, into exile for accidentally killing a boy.Īnd then comes the memorable line: 'During the last planting season a white man had appeared in their clan.' The white missionaries, and the terrible destruction they brought, had arrived. Rereading it before I see Achebe, I find the book has lost none of its power to shock.

That 'something inside me' was his first, and enduringly monumental, novel, Things Fall Apart. I just knew that there was something inside me that wanted me to tell who I was, and that would have come out even if I didn't want it.' 'But when I began I had no idea what this was going to be. 'I'm a practised writer now,' he says, as we start to talk in his small, homely sitting room. A writer as driven and as political as Achebe neither needs nor solicits such recognition, yet he is grateful to receive it. She was one of the judges who awarded Achebe, now 76, this year's Man Booker international prize, given every two years for an exceptional lifetime's achievement. Nadine Gordimer, one of the many writers indebted to Achebe for the ground that he broke, described him last month as the 'father of modern African literature'. It seems a strange place to find the writer credited above all others with inventing the modern African novel.

Achebe books