Nigerian Novelist Chinua Achebe Wins Man Booker International
By James Pressley
June 13 (Bloomberg) -- Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe, the author of ``Things Fall Apart'' and ``Anthills of the Savannah,'' won the Man Booker International Prize, defeating an illustrious list of contenders including Ian McEwan, Carlos Fuentes, Philip Roth and Salman Rushdie.
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First bestowed on the Albanian writer Ismail Kadare in 2005, the 60,000 pound ($118,600) prize is awarded every two years to recognize ``a living author who has contributed significantly to world literature.''
A three-judge panel including South African author Nadine Gordimer honored Achebe, 76, for inaugurating the modern African novel, citing the many writers inspired by his depictions of how colonialism influenced culture and civilization on the continent.
``Chinua Achebe's early work made him the father of modern African literature as an integral part of world literature,'' Gordimer said in a statement. ``He has gone on to achieve what one of his characters brilliantly defines as the writer's purpose: `a new-found utterance' for the capture of life's complexity.''
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Achebe created ``an original synthesis of the psychological novel, the Joycean Stream of Consciousness, the post-modern breaking of sequence,'' said Gordimer, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1991.
Diplomat for Biafra
Born in 1930 and educated in Nigeria, Achebe received a bachelor's degree from the University of London in 1953. A year later, he joined the Nigerian Broadcasting Co. in Lagos, where he later became director of external broadcasting. His debut novel, ``Things Fall Apart,'' appeared in 1958 and has sold more than 10 million copies worldwide.
He became a diplomat for Biafra during its struggle to break away from Nigeria in the late 1960s. After the war, he was named Senior Research Fellow at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, where he is emeritus professor of English. He currently lives in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, where he is Charles P. Stevenson Jr. Professor of Languages and Literature at Bard College.
Paralyzed from the waist down following a car accident in 1990, he hasn't published a novel since ``Anthills'' appeared in 1988. In both ``Anthills'' and ``A Man of the People,'' Achebe took aim at how Nigerian politicians and military rulers helped propel Africa's most populous nation into one of the world's most corrupt.
`Clouds Are Gathering'
In 2004, he protested the state of affairs in Nigeria by refusing to accept the country's second-highest honor, the Commander of the Federal Republic.
Before presidential and parliamentary elections this year, Achebe issued a statement titled ``The Clouds Are Gathering'' in which he accused then-President Olusegun Obasanjo of taking ``Nigeria as low as she has ever gone.'' The next month, Nigeria staged elections that most international and domestic monitoring groups said weren't credible because of widespread vote rigging.
Achebe will receive the prize money and a trophy at a ceremony on June 28 at Christ Church in Oxford. The award is sponsored by Man Group Plc, the world's largest publicly traded hedge-fund manager, which also backs the annual Man Booker Prize for Fiction, the U.K.'s most coveted literary award.
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