Flora Nwapa

Flora Nwapa, born Florence Nwanzuruahu Nkiru Nwapa in 1931 and died in 1993, was a Nigerian author often called the mother of modern African literature. She became the first African woman novelist published in English by a British publisher with her debut novel Efuru (1966), which centers an independent-minded Igbo woman and her place within her community's expectations of marriage and motherhood. Beyond her fiction, Nwapa founded Tana Press in 1970, becoming one of the earliest African women publishers, and her work as a whole is noted for putting Igbo women's own perspectives and voices at the center of the story, at a time when African fiction in English was overwhelmingly written and centered on men.