EMECHETA was born on  July 21, 1944, in Lagos, Nigeria, to Alice (Okwuekwuhe) Emecheta and Jeremy Nwabudinke.  Her father was a railway worker and molder.

Due to the gender bias of the time, the young Buchi Emecheta was initially kept at home while her younger brother was sent to school; but after persuading her parents to consider the benefits of her education, she spent her early childhood at an all-girls’ missionary school. Her father died when she was nine years old.

A year later, Emecheta received a full scholarship to the Methodist Girls School, where she remained until the age of 16 when, in 1960, she married Sylvester Onwordi, a student to whom she had been engaged to since she was 11 years old.

Onwordi immediately moved to London to attend university and Emecheta joined him. She gave birth to five children in six years.

Late Buchi Emecheta

It was an unhappy and sometimes violent marriage (as chronicled in her autobiographical writings such as Second-Class Citizen). To keep her sanity, Emecheta wrote in her spare time; however, her husband was deeply suspicious of her writing, and he ultimately burned her first manuscript; she has said that The Bride Price, eventually published in 1976, would have been her first book but she had to rewrite it after it was destroyed: “There were five years between the two versions.

Child slavery, female independence

At the age of 22, Emecheta left her husband.  While working to support her five children alone, she earned a B.Sc degree in Sociology.

Her themes of child slavery, motherhood, female independence and freedom through education won her considerable critical acclaim and honours. Emecheta once described her stories as “stories of the world… (where)… women face the universal problems of poverty and oppression, and the longer they stay, no matter where they have come from originally, the more the problems become identical.”

She has been characterised as “the first successful black woman novelist living in Britain after 1948”

Career: She began writing about her experiences of Black British life in a regular column in the New Statesman and a collection of these pieces became her first published book in 1972, In the Ditch. The semi-autobiographical book chronicled the struggles of the main character named Adah, who is forced to live in a housing estate while working as a librarian to support her five children.

Her second novel published two years later, Second-Class Citizen, also drew on Emecheta’s own experiences, and both books were eventually published in one volume under the title Adah’s Story (Allison and Busby, 1983).

Following her success as an author, Emecheta travelled widely as a visiting professor and lecturer. From 1982 to 1983 Emecheta, together with her son Sylvester, ran the Ogwugwu Afor Publishing Company, publishing her own work under the imprint. Buchi Emecheta suffered a stroke  in 2010, and she died in London in January 2017, aged 72.