Buchi Emecheta
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- In full:
- Florence Onyebuchi Emecheta
Buchi Emecheta (born July 21, 1944, Lagos, Nigeria—died January 25, 2017, London, England) was an Igbo writer whose novels deal largely with the difficult and unequal role of women in both immigrant and African societies and explore the tension between tradition and modernity.
Emecheta married at age 16, and she emigrated with her husband from Nigeria to London in 1962. She began writing stories based on her life, including the problems she initially encountered in England. These works were first published in New Statesman magazine and were later collected in the novel In the Ditch (1972). That work was followed by Second-Class Citizen (1974), and both were later included in the single volume Adah’s Story (1983). Those books introduce Emecheta’s three major themes: the quests for equal treatment, self-confidence, and dignity as a woman. Somewhat different in style is Emecheta’s novel Gwendolen (1989; also published as The Family), which addresses the issues of immigrant life in Great Britain, as do Kehinde (1994) and The New Tribe (2000).
Most of Emecheta’s other novels—including The Bride Price (1976), The Slave Girl (1977), The Joys of Motherhood (1979), Destination Biafra (1982), and Double Yoke (1982)—are realistic works of fiction set in Nigeria. Perhaps her strongest work, The Rape of Shavi (1983), is also the most difficult to categorize. Set in an imaginary idyllic African kingdom, it explores the dislocations that occur when a plane carrying Europeans seeking to escape an imminent nuclear disaster crashes.
Emecheta wrote an autobiography, Head Above Water (1986), and several works of children’s and juvenile fiction. She was made an Officer of the British Empire (OBE) in 2005.