Chinua Achebe

Nigerian novelist, poet and critic, widely regarded as a central figure of modern African literature. His first novel, Things Fall Apart (1958), depicting the arrival of British colonial administration and Christian missionaries in an Igbo village through the tragic decline of its protagonist Okonkwo, became one of the most widely read novels in African literature and the first African novel in English to achieve global canonical status. Achebe wrote three further novels often read alongside it as an African quartet, No Longer at Ease, Arrow of God and A Man of the People, and was an influential critic of the portrayal of Africa in Western literature, including his widely discussed critique of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness.