Buchi Emecheta

BE was an African writer settled in England and writing about life in London from the point of view of a foreigner or immigrant trying to make her way. Looking back from afar at her homeland, Nigeria, she compared its culture and traditions with those in her new homeland. Her novels deal with displacement, diaspora, and tension between the traditional ways of her Igbo culture and the independence a woman can acquire through education and hard work. BE published —besides her primary genre, the novel—plays for television, children's books, and articles for periodicals including the New Statesman, the Times Literary Supplement, the Guardian, Kunapipi, Granta, and West Africa. This is a considerable generic range for someone writing in her fourth language. Her twenty novels have been translated into French, German, Italian, and Korean.