Professor Chinua Achebe is dead

Chinua Achebe

Popular Nigerian novelist, poet, professor, and critic best known for his novel and magnum opus, ‘Things Fall Apart’, is dead.

He died Thursday night (March 22, 2013) in a hospital in Boston, Massachusetts at the age of 82.

The professor had been ill for a while and was hospitalised in an undisclosed hospital in Boston.

He had been living in the US since 1990 following injuries from a car crash.

Achebe received over 30 honorary degrees from universities in England, Scotland, Canada, South Africa, Nigeria and the United States, including Dartmouth College, Harvard, and Brown University. He was awarded the Commonwealth Poetry Prize, an Honorary Fellowship of the American Academy of Arts and Letters (1982), a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2002), the Nigerian National Order of Merit (Nigeria’s highest honour for academic work), the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade. The Man Booker International Prize 2007 and the 2010 Dorothy and Lillian Gish Prize. are two of the more recent accolades Achebe has received.

Details are still unfolding...