Google honors Buchi Emecheta with a Google doodle

Google has created a Google Doodle to honor Nigerian-born British novelist, Florence Onyebuchi “Buchi” Emecheta OBE, on the 21st of July. 

The writer would be celebrating her 75th birthday if she was alive today.

Buchi moved to Britain in 1960 where she worked as a librarian and became a student at London University in 1970, where she studied Sociology.

Also, the novelist worked as a community worker in Camden, North London, between 1976 and 1978.

Most of her fiction has focused on sexual politics and racial prejudice and is based on her own experiences as both a single parent and a black woman living in Britain. 

In 1972, her first novel, the semi-autobiographical “In the Ditch” was published. It first appeared in a series of articles published in the New Statesman magazine, and, together with its sequel, Second Class Citizen (1974), provides a fictionalized portrait of a poor young Nigerian woman struggling to bring up her children in London. 

In 1976, she began to write about the role of women in Nigerian society in “The Bride Price” and “The Slave Girl a year after.

The award-winning writer won the New Statesman Jock Campbell Award and wrote the Joys of Motherhood in 1979, a book which shows the account of women’s experiences bringing up children in the face of changing values in traditional Ibo society.

Being an author of several novels for children, she published a volume of autobiography, Head Above Water, in 1986. 

In 1976, her television play, A Kind of Marriage, was first screened by the BBC. 

She was selected as one of twenty ‘Best of Young British Writers’ by the Book Marketing Council in 1983.

Also, the Novelist lectured in the United States all through 1979 and was a Visiting Professor at a number of universities.

In 1980, Buchi returned to Nigeria as a Senior Research Fellow and Visiting Professor of English at the University of Calabar.

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She ran the Ogwugwu Afor Publishing Company with her son and was a member of the Home Secretary’s Advisory Council on Race. She was a member of the Arts Council from 1982 to 1983 and was a regular contributor to the New Statesman, the Times Literary Supplement and The Guardian.

Buchi Emecheta died in 2017.