Chinua Achebe

Chinua Achebe says Africans should tell their own stories.

The celebrated Nigerian author Chinua Achebe is to advise Penguin on a new series of books which aims to publish the very best in African writing.


Achebe's own short story collection, Girls at War, will be one of six inaugural books in the Penguin African Writers series, which launches this August and will also include Ngugi wa Thiong'o's Weep Not, Child, about the effects of the Mau Mau war on the ordinary people of Kenya, and the second novel by Zimbabwean Dambudzo Marechera.


"The last 500 years of European contact with Africa produced a body of literature that presented Africa in a very bad light and now the time has come for Africans to tell their own stories," said Achebe, author of the classics Things Fall Apart and Anthills of the Savannah. "Africa is not simple – often people want to simplify it, generalise it, stereotype its people, but Africa is very complex."


Achebe hopes the series will bring new energy to African literature, and will help it reach a wider audience. "This is really what I personally want to see – writers from all over Africa contributing to a definition of themselves, writing ourselves and our stories into history," he said. "One of the greatest things literature does is allow us to imagine; to identify with situations and people who live in completely different circumstances, in countries all over the world. Through this series, the creative exploration of those issues and experiences that are unique to the African consciousness will be given a platform, not only throughout Africa, but also beyond its shores."


Achebe, winner of the 2007 Man Booker international prize, was the original series editor of the Heinemann African Writers series, set up in 1962; he worked on the list for its first decade. The new series, which will be published by Penguin South Africa, will include some of the best of the Heinemann titles as well as new voices from across the African continent.


Achebe's own contribution to the launch list, Girls at War, was first published in 1972 and includes three stories set during the Biafran war. Marechera, who won the Guardian fiction prize for the short story collection The House of Hunger, is on the list for his second novel, Black Sunlight, about a photographer travelling across a war-battered Zimbabwe. It was initially banned in Zimbabwe following publication in 1980.


Guyana-born Karen King-Aribisala's Hangman's Game, which centres on the story of a young Guyanese woman writing an historical novel about the 1823 Demerara slave rebellion, sits alongside Neighbours: The Story of Murder by Mozambican Lilia Momple, which details a South African conspiracy to destabilise Mozambique and how it tragically affects the lives of ordinary people. Cote d'Ivoirian Veronique Tadjo's novel As the Crow Flies, a mosaic of 20th-century life, is the final title for the launch list.


"Storytelling is a creative component of human experience, and in order to share our experiences with the world, we as Africans need to recognise the importance of our own stories," said Achebe. "I am honoured to join Penguin in inviting young and upcoming writers to accept the challenge passed down by celebrated African authors of earlier decades and to continue to explore, confront and question the realities of life in Africa through their work; challenging Africa's people to lift her to her rightful place among the nations of the world."


Penguin also announced today that it would be establishing a new literary prize for African writers, which will offer the authors of previously unpublished works in both fiction and non-fiction the opportunity to win R50,000 (£3,800) and a contract with Penguin South Africa.