Google Celebrates ‘Joys Of Motherhood Author’, Buchi Emecheta On 75th Birthday And Here’s Her Profile
- Anu
- July 21, 2019
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Google is today celebrating renowned Nigerian author and novelist, Buchi Emecheta on her posthumous birthday with its Doodle.
Emecheta would have been 75 today if she was alive.
Here are some things you should know her.
- Emecheta was born on 21 July 1944, in Lagos, Nigeria, to Igbo parents
2. At age 10, she received a full scholarship to Methodist Girls’ School, Lagos.
3. She got married at age 16 in 1960 to Sylvester Onwordi, a schoolboy to whom she had been engaged since she was 11 years old. Later that year, she gave birth to a daughter, and in 1961 their younger son was born.
4. She joined her husband with their first two children when he moved to London to attend a university in 1962.
6. She gave birth to five children in six years, three daughters and two sons.
7. She wrote in her spare time as her marriage was unhappy and sometimes violent.
8. Her husband burned her first manuscript as revealed in The Bride Price, eventually published in 1976.
9. Emecheta left her husband at the age of 22, pregnant with her fifth child.
10. She earned a B.Sc (Hons) degree in Sociology in 1972 from the University of London while working to support her children alone.
12. She went on later to gain her PhD from the university in 1991.
13. Emecheta worked as a library officer for the British Museum in London from 1965 to 1969.
14. From 1969 to 1976, she was a youth worker and sociologist for the Inner London Education Authority and from 1976 to 1978 she worked as a community worker in Camden, North London.
15. Her first book In the Ditch was published in 1972.
16. She was a senior resident fellow and visiting professor of English at the University of Calabar, Nigeria from 1980 to 1981
17. Emecheta, together with her son Sylvester, ran the Ogwugwu Afor Publishing Company from 1982 to 1983 publishing her own work under the imprint, beginning with Double Yoke.
18. Over the course of her life, Emecheta published 16 novels, including: “In The Ditch, Second-Class Citizen”, “Joys of Motherhood” and “Slave Girl”, as well as her 1986 autobiography, “Head Above Water” and wrote several plays for stage, TV and radio.
19. Her awards include the Jock Campbell Award from the New Statesman in 1978 for her novel The Slave Girl, Granta magazine’s 1983 list of 20 “Best of Young British Novelists”, Honorary doctorate of literature from Farleigh Dickinson University in 1992 and OBE for services to literature in 2005.
20. She became a Fellow at the University of London in 1986 and over the years, she worked with many cultural and literary organizations, including the Africa Centre, London, and with the Caine Prize for African Writing as a member of the Advisory Council.
21. Emecheta suffered a stroke in 2010, and she died in London on 25 January 2017, aged 72.
