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Achebe’s ‘Things Fall Apart’ rated as one of the top 10 novels that changed the world

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Achebe’s ‘Things Fall Apart’ rated as one of the top 10 stories that changed the world

The BBC in an article published in its culture section, rates Chinua Achebe’s ‘Things Fall Apart’ (perhaps the most widely read book in modern African literature) as one of the top 10 stories that changed the world.

Published Tuesday, May 22, the list was arrived at after votes were cast by the renowned writers, critics and academics in an attempt to arrive at the most influential and enduring works of fiction ever written.

“Published within my lifetime, it has been possible to see the effect of a single work of fiction in offering a radically different ‘view of Africa’,” says novelist Beverley Naidoo. “The European colonial narrative could never be the same after this first work by Achebe was published.”

Read also: Achebe’s ‘Things Fall Apart’ listed among 12 “Greatest Books Ever Written”

It’s “an empowering African novel: it brought African experience to the world like no other African fiction has”, according to Dominica Dipio, Associate Professor of Literature at Makerere University in Uganda. Noun Fare, a novelist and journalist from Togo, calls Chinua Achebe’s 1959 novel “a milestone in African literature. It has come to be seen as the archetypal modern African novel in English, and is read in Nigeria and throughout Africa”.

The rating by the BBC comes a month after the same book by Chinua Achebe was ranked by the Encyclopedia Britannica as one of the twelve novels considered the “Greatest Books Ever Written”.

According to the compilation written by John Pecoraro, the book ‘Things Fall Apart’ which now exists in 57 translations across the world, with 20 million copies sold worldwide is one of the greatest ever written novels on the website of Encyclopedia Britannica in recent times.

The positive developments are coming months after marking the 60th anniversary of the publication of the novel and the release of a new edition of the classic read with cover artwork by Nigerian artist, Victor Ekpuk.

 

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