Nigerian Author Chinua Achebe died following a Brief Illness

Renowned Nigerian author Chinua Achebe died on 22 March 2013 in Boston at the age of 82 following a brief illness. He had been living in the US since 1990 after a car crash left him partially paralysed and in a wheelchair. South African writer and Nobel laureate Nadine Gordimer called him the father of modern African literature in 2007. In fact, she was among the judges to award him the Man Booker International Prize in honour of his literary career in the same year.

Chinua Achebe Fact-Sheet
• He was Born in 1930, 30 years before Nigeria's independence
• His First novel Things Fall Apart was published in 1958; sold 10 million copies
• He wrote about the effects of colonialism and corruption
• Nelson Mandela called him the writer in whose company the prison walls came down
• Involved in a road accident in 1990 which left him partially paralysed
• Refused Nigerian honours
• In 2012, Achebe published a long-awaited memoir about the brutal three-year Biafran war - when the south-eastern Igbo region tried to split from Nigeria in 1967.

Achebe's body is due to be buried near his family's home in Ogidi, a small town in the hills of Anambra state.