Buchi Emecheta OBE was a Nigerian novelist who has published over 20 books, including Second-Class Citizen (1974), The Bride Price (1976), The Slave Girl (1977) and The Joys of Motherhood (1979). Her themes of child slavery, motherhood, female independence, and freedom through education have won her considerable critical acclaim and honours, including an Order of the British Empire in 2005. 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.”
Books in order of publication:
Novels
In the Ditch (1972)
Second Class Citizen (1974)
The Bride Price (1976)
The Slave Girl (1977); winner of the New Statesman’s 1978 Jock Campbell Award
The Joys of Motherhood (1979)
The Moonlight Bride (1981)
Destination Biafra (1982)
Naira Power (1982)
Adah’s Story [In the Ditch/Second-Class Citizen] (London: Allison & Busby, 1983).
The Rape of Shavi (1983)
Double Yoke (1982)
A Kind of Marriage (London: Macmillan, 1986); Pacesetter Novels series.
Gwendolen (1989). Published in the US as The Family
Kehinde (1994)
The New Tribe (2000)
Autobiography
Head above Water (1984; 1986)
Children’s/Young adults’ books
Titch the Cat (illustrated by Thomas Joseph; 1979)
Nowhere to Play (illustrated by Peter Archer; 1980)
The Wrestling Match (1981)
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