Chinua Achebe

Achebe grew up in the Igbo town of Ogidi, the son of a Christian mission catechist, straddling a household of hymns and a village still steeped in the old religion he would later render from the inside. He studied medicine briefly at Nigeria's first university before switching to literature, and worked for years at the Nigerian Broadcasting Corporation while writing his first novel on the side.

Things Fall Apart appeared in 1958, two years before Nigerian independence, and its calm, unapologetic rendering of Igbo life before the missionaries arrived overturned a century of colonial fiction in one stroke. Arrow of God followed in 1964, an even more intricate study of a priest broken by pride and empire. During the Nigerian Civil War he served the breakaway Biafran government as a cultural envoy, then spent much of his later career teaching in the United States, paralyzed from the waist down after a 1990 car accident, until his death in 2013.