Chinua Achebe, celebrated author, needs no introduction. This year he releases his first major work in decades - The Education of a British Protected Child, which offers “reflections on personal and collective identity, on home and family, on literature, language and politics, and on the author’s lifelong attempt to reclaim the definition of ‘Africa’ for its own authorship”.
It’s also a year that marks a major change in Achebe’s academic life: he’s leaving his longtime redoubt at Bard College for the more prominent confines of Brown University. 2009: an auspicious Achebe year!
We bring you a just-published podcast from the Bard era (1994, to be precise), in which Achebe reads from his celebrated novel, Anthills of the Savannah - as well as an Igbo dirge in honour of Martin Luther King. The recording has surfaced on the web to mark Achebe’s return to the Unterberg Poetry Center in New York City earlier this month, where he was in conversation with noted American academic K Anthony Appiah.
Achebe and Appiah’s conversation was video recorded; you can watch it in full at the link below. But first the podcast:
Podcast: Chinua Achebe reads from Anthills of the Savannah
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“For so many readers around the world, it is Chinua Achebe who opened up the magic casements of African fiction,” said K Anthony Appiah. Watch his conversation with the iconic author:
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Photo courtesy nostri-imago
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