# The Biafra Broadcasts *A Biography of Chinua Achebe* — Legendary Biographies No. 086 - **Subject:** Albert Chinụalụmọgụ Achebe - **Written by:** Eleanor Whitlock - **Shelf:** Letters & Ideas / Literature - **Published:** 2026 - **Extent:** 198 pages, 6 × 9 in, 60# uncoated cream, black ink - **Paperback:** $19.99 — 6 × 9 in · 198 pp · 60# uncoated cream, black ink · perfect-bound paperback - **EPUB:** $3.99 — EPUB 3 · DRM-free · reads on Kindle, Kobo and Apple Books (ISBN 979-8-90623-089-8) - **Audiobook:** $5.99 — Unabridged · measured from the masters · read by Rowan Hale (ISBN 979-8-90623-180-2) Buy it, or read the opening free: volumes/086-the-biafra-broadcasts.html ## About this book He was born Albert Chinụalụmọgụ Achebe on November 16, 1930, in Ogidi, Anambra State, the fifth of six children of an Anglican mission teacher. He read English literature at the University College Ibadan in the early 1950s, joined the Nigerian Broadcasting Service in 1954, and published Things Fall Apart in 1958. The novel sold more than twenty million copies and was translated into fifty-seven languages, more than any other work of African literature. He was thirty-eight when the Biafran War began in 1967. He served as a diplomatic envoy for the breakaway Republic of Biafra and was nearly killed by Federal Army shelling at the Biafra Radio compound in Aba in early 1969. He survived a March 1990 car accident on the Lagos-Owerri highway that left him paralysed from the waist down. He died in Boston on March 21, 2013, at eighty-two. Eleanor Whitlock's biography opens earlier and follows the arc with the patience the subject's career deserves. The book traces the Ogidi childhood and the Government College Umuahia secondary years, the University College Ibadan and the University Herald editorship, the Things Fall Apart manuscript and the William Heinemann publication, the long African Writers Series at Heinemann that Achebe edited from 1962 to 1972, the Biafran War years and the Beware Soul Brother poems, the 1990 car accident and the long second life in Boston, the Anthills of the Savannah shortlisted Booker, and the 2007 Man Booker International Prize. What emerges is a portrait of the Nigerian novelist whose Things Fall Apart the post-1958 history of African literature is in many respects the long unfolding of. ## Contents 1. The Crossroads 2. Albert and Chinua 3. The Boy Who Read 4. Ibadan 5. The Answer 6. Independence 7. The Voice of Nigeria 8. The Prophetic Novel 9. Biafra: The Secession 10. Biafra: The Famine 11. The Aftermath 12. The Essayist 13. The Editor and the Teacher 14. The Long Return 15. The Accident 16. American Exile 17. There Was a Country 18. The Reckoning ## Questions **Who is The Biafra Broadcasts about?** Albert Chinụalụmọgụ Achebe. The title never carries the subject's name: it names one concrete thing out of the life — in this case The Biafra Broadcasts — and the name goes on the line underneath. **Is this an authorised biography?** No. No subject, estate, label or foundation had approval over the text, and none paid for a word of it. The cost of that independence is that no new interviews were conducted for the book; it is built from the public record, and it says on the page where a scene is reconstructed rather than documented. **Can I read some of it before buying?** Yes — the whole opening chapter and the writer's foreword, free and in full, with no email address and no account. That is 4,521 words of the book. **How long is it?** About 60,500 words, 18 chapters, 198 pages in the paperback. **What is the printed book like?** 6 × 9 in, 60# uncoated cream, black ink, perfect-bound paperback, matte laminate. Every title in the series uses the same specification, so they line up on a shelf. ## The writer Eleanor Whitlock is a New York-based biographer who writes about American women of letters and their reckonings with celebrity. Her research focuses on the private spaces and public moments that shape literary history, as seen in her biographies of Joan Didion and Susan Sontag, both of which were shortlisted for national biography prizes. Through titles like Black Holes, The Lake Forest Park Sidewalk, and The Biafra Broadcasts, she examines the intersection of archival history and personal narrative. Her other publications include The Jamaican Renaissance, The Fitzroy Road Kitchen, The Plaza Hotel Party, The Owl Farm, and The Elysee Hotel. She lives in Brooklyn, New York, where she spends her spare time restoring vintage typewriters and walking in Prospect Park.