Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart sets new record

The Wylie Agency – considered the most powerful and influential literary agency in the world – has reported that their client Professor Chinua Achebe’s Things FallApart which celebrates its 55th year of continuous publication in 2013, “has sold between 15 million and 20 million copies world wide in 60 languages.”

Professor Chinua Achebe who died earlier this year (March 21, 2013) was born in eastern Nigeria on November 16, 1930, to Isaiah Okafor Achebe and Janet Achebe. After an early education in British styled public schools and university in colonial Nigeria, Professor Chinua Achebe became an author of over twenty books; Poetry, novels, children's books, essays, and political as well as literary criticism. He is probably best known internationally for the trio of novels globally recognized as “the African Trilogy” – “Things Fall Apart, No Longer at ease and Arrow of God.

Of the trio, “Arrow of God” is considered his magnum opus, and his first novel “Things Fall Apart” – the most widely read book in modern African literature – which depicts the collision between British rule and traditional Igbo culture in his native southeast Nigeria; is considered a world literary masterpiece and is studied across the globe in high schools and colleges. In 2012 he published his memoirs There was a country – which earned him a spot on Foreign Policy magazine’s list of Top100 Global thinkers of 2012[ii] for “forcing Africans to examine their demons.”

Professor Achebe is credited as the major 20th Century Literary voice to bring African culture and literature to the rest of the world. A statement from the Nelson Mandela Foundation in South quotedNelson Mandela as referring to Professor Chinua Achebe as a writer “in whose company the prison walls fell down.”

Professor Achebe established the Chinua Achebe Foundation in the early ‘90s. Chaired by Archbishop Desmond Tutu, the foundation has worked tirelessly to promote peace through the arts; showcase Africa’s complex cultural heritage to the world while recapturing lost components of African fine art, literature and languages.

Through his work as the editor of the African Writers Series, published by England’s Heinemann publishers, “the series served as  a vehicle for whole generation of African writers, ensuring an international voice to literary masters including Ayi Kwei Armah, Ng?g? wa Thiong’o , Steve Biko , Ama Ata Aidoo , Nadine Gordimer , Buchi Emecheta and Okot p’Bitek .” For intermittent periods, Professor Achebe lived and worked as a professor in the United States, lecturing widely and teaching in universities in Massachusetts, Connecticut, New York, and most recently at Brown University in Rhode Island.

Professor Achebe also earned a powerful reputation as a formidable advocate for the “least amongst us” – the down trodden, powerless and voiceless everywhere and a leading critic of graft and misrule in his native Nigeria and twice refused one of that nation’s highest honors Commander of the Federal Republic, in 2004 and 2011 in protest.