Buchi Emecheta

Buchi Emecheta was born in Lagos in 1944. She was orphaned by the age of I and moved to the UK with her husband in 1960. When her marriage broke down, she raised her five young children as a single mother. Emecheta began writing about her experiences for the New Statesman in 1972, and these columns formed the basis for her first published novel, In the Ditch. She went on to publish a second semi-autobiographical novel, Second-Class Citizen, in 1974, followed by many more during her thirty-year writing career, including the critically acclaimed The Joys of Motherhood. Alongside these novels, Emecheta also published several children’s stories, wrote a television play and continued as a regular contributor to the New Statesman as well as the Guardian and The Times Literary Supplement. Emecheta received a number of literary awards and accolades over the years, including the 1977 Jock Campbell New Statesman award for her novel Slave Girl. She died in London in 2017.

Emecheta’s themes of child slavery, motherhood, female independence and freedom through education gained recognition from critics and honours. She once described her stories as “stories of the world, where women face the universal problems of poverty and oppression, and the longer they stay, no matter where they have come from originally, the more the problems become identical.” Her works explore the tension between tradition and modernity. She has been characterized as “the first successful black woman novelist living in Britain after 1948”.