The biography of Buchi Emecheta

Florence Onye Buchi Emecheta is a PEPA African novelist who has published over 20 books, plays and shorts about child slavery, motherhood, female independence and freedom, and she was born on July 21, 1944, in Lagos, Nigeria.
She is the daughter of Alice (okwuekwuhe) Emecheta and Jeremy Nwabudinke, who was railway worker in the 40s’.
Due to the gender discrimination, Buchi was kept at home while her younger brother was sent to school, but after persuading her parents to consider the benefits about her education, Buchi was then sent to an all-girl’s missionary school.
When Buchi was nine years old, her father died and, one year later she received a full scholarship to the Methodist Girls School.
At eleven she got engaged to Sylvester Onwordi, and she stayed at the Methodist Girls School until their marriage, when Buchi turned sixteen years old.
After their marriage Sylvester moved to London to attend University and Buchi only joined in 1962.
In six years Buchi already had five children, but she was unhappy and trapped in oft-violent marriage.
Buchi, then started writing in her spare time, although her husband, suspicious of what she wrote, burned her first manuscript
At the age of twenty-two, while working as a librarian at the British Museum, where she stayed from 1965 to 1969, Buchi left her husband and supported all of her five children while earning a BSc degree in sociology at the University of London.
She also wrote many articles about Black British life in several journals and newspapers.
In 1972 she published her first book of shorts, titled ‘In the Ditch’. This book showed the struggles of a main character named Adah, who was forced to live in a housing estate while working as a librarian to support her five children, needless to say, this story talked about her own life.
In 1974 her book Second-Class Citizen was published and, both this book and In the Ditch were published as one single book titled Adah’s Story in 1983.

Until 1976 she was a youth worker and sociologist for the Inner London Education Authority. After that she visited the United States and was a community worker in Camden, New Jersey, from 1976 to 1978.
From 1972 to 1979 she visited several American Universities, including Pennsylvania State University, Rutgers University, The University of California, Los Angeles and the University of Illinois, and she travelled all throughout the world giving lectures as the successful author she was.
From 1980 to 1981, Dr. Emecheta was the senior resident fellow and visiting professor of English at the University of Calabar in Nigeria.
In 1982, Dr. Emecheta saw her lecture at Yale University, and the University of London, and a fellowship at the University of London in 1986.

Source:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buchi_Emecheta

Made by: Ana Cláudia, Débora Sofia e Ruthermassy.