Chinua Achebe: A Life at the Crossroads

Terri Ochiagha, a leading scholar of Chinua Achebe’s work, is Lecturer in Global Anglophone Literatures at the University of Edinburgh and currently a fellow at the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard University. Ochiagha’s first book, Achebe and Friends at Umuahia: The Making of a Literary Elite won the 2016 African Studies Association of the UK’s Fage & Oliver Prize for the most Outstanding Work on Africa published between 2014-2015. She is also the author of A Short History of Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart.

Based on a combination of archival, bibliographic research, literary analysis and oral history, Chinua Achebe: A Life at the Crossroads, the first full-length biography of Chinua Achebe and under contract with Princeton University Press, will underscore his complexity and contest reductive understandings of his importance. Rather than treating Achebe in isolation, it situates him and his work in their intellectual, political, social and cultural universe, offering a fresh interpretation of his extensive body of work, cultural militancy, and political life. While adhering to the highest standards of scholarly rigour, the biography will bring Achebe to a wide public audience. This is particularly pertinent in this cultural moment, which aspires to what Achebe himself called, in the title of one of his finest essays, “the balance of stories.”

Questions about the event, or accommodations needed for it, please contact Christie Henry, Director of the Princeton University Press.