On 21st July, 2019, Google doodle celebrated Buchi Emecheta on her 75th Post humous birthday.
Florence Onyebuchi “Buchi” Emecheta (21 July 1944 – 25 January 2017) was a Nigerian-born novelist, who wrote plays and an autobiography, as well as works for children. She was the author of more than 20 books, including Second Class Citizen (1974), The Bride Price (1976), The Slave Girl (1977) and The Joys of Motherhood (1979). Her books amazingly explored several themes including poverty, child slavery, the tension between tradition and modernity, motherhood, female independence and freedom through education. She has been characterized as “the first successful black woman novelist living in Britain after 1948.
Emecheta began writing about her experiences of Black British life in a regular column in the New Statesman, a collection of these pieces became her first published book in 1972, In the Ditch, a semi-autobiographical novel. Her second novel published two years later, Second-Class Citizen (Allison and Busby, 1974), also drew on Emecheta’s own experiences, and both books were eventually published in one volume. These three stories introduced Emecheta’s three major themes which were the quest for equality, self confidence and dignity as a woman.
Following her success as an author, Emecheta travelled widely as a visiting professor and lecturer. She visited several American universities and from 1980 to 1981, was senior resident fellow and visiting professor of English at the University of Calabar, Nigeria. From 1982 to 1983, Emecheta, together with her son Sylvester, ran the Ogwugwu Afor Publishing Company, publishing her own work under the imprint, beginning with Double Yoke. Emecheta received an Arts Council of Great Britain bursary, 1982–83,and was one of Granta′s “Best of the Young British Novelists” in 1983. In 1982, she lectured at Yale University, and the University of London, and became a Fellow at the University of London in 1986.
In 2017, Emecheta’s son Sylvester Onwordi announced the formation of The Buchi Emecheta Foundation – a charitable organisation promoting literary and educational projects in the UK and in Africa Buchi Emecheta features at number 98 on a list of 100 women recognised in August 2018 by BBC History Magazine as having changed the world. Among honours received during her literary career, Emecheta won the Jock Campbell Award from the New Statesman in 1978 for her novel The Slave Girl, and she was on Granta magazine’s 1983 list of 20 “Best of Young British Novelists”.She was a member of the British Home Secretary’s Advisory Council on Race in 1979.
In September 2004, she appeared in the “A Great Day in London” photograph taken at the British Library, featuring 50 Black and Asian writers who have made major contributions to contemporary British literature. In 2005, she was made an OBE for services to literature. She received an Honorary doctorate of literature from Farleigh Dickinson University in 1992. Most of her fictional works are focused on sexual discrimination and racial prejudice informed by her own experiences as both a single parent and a black woman living in United Kingdom.
Culled from Wikipedia
