Man Booker International Prize 2007

NIGERIAN NOVELIST Chinua Achebe, the founding father of Nigerian literature in English, has been announced the winner of the 2nd Man Booker International Prize for Fiction. The Man Booker International Prize is worth £60,000 and is awarded once every two years to a living author for an ouvre or an entire body of work that has contributed to an achievement in fiction on the world stage. It was first awarded to Albanian Ismail Kadaré in 2005. Achebe is probably best known for his first novel, Things Fall Apart (1958), and Anthills of the Savannah (1987), shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize for Fiction in 1987.

In the early 1970s, John Updike in The New Yorker described Things Fall Apart as follows: “Writing with a beautiful economy, Achebe seized the basic African subject—the breakup, under colonialism, of tribal society—so firmly and fairly that the book’s tragedy, like Greek tragedy, felt tonic; a space had been cleared, an understanding had been acheived, a new beginning was implied.”

Past Recipients
2007 Chinua Achebe (Nigeria)
2005 Ismail Kadaré (Albania)