Buchi Emecheta is to date the most important female African writer. The extent of her output and the centrality of her subject matter--the role of women in present-day Africa--have put her in this position. In her fiction she shows courage in challenging traditional male attitudes about gender roles; anger and iconoclastic contempt for unjust institutions, no matter how time-honored or revered they are; and a willingness to seek new ways to break what she sees as the unjust subjugation of women in the name of tradition.

Emecheta was born on 21 July 1944 in Yaba near Lagos, Nigeria, to Jeremy Nwabudike Emecheta (a railway worker and molder) and Alice Okwuekwu Emecheta, both Igbos. The young Emecheta was orphaned early on and educated at a missionary school until she was sixteen, when she married and moved to London. Her first two books, In the Ditch (1972) and Second-Class Citizen (1974), are heavily autobiographical...