Overview
Biography
Nwapa studied at Ibadan and Edinburgh and worked as a teacher and education officer before publishing Efuru with Heinemann in 1966, a novel centred on a woman trader in a lakeside Igbo town. Idu followed in 1970, then One is Enough, Never Again, Women are Different and several children's books.
After the civil war she served in the East Central State government with responsibility for health, lands and later for survey and reconstruction, work concerned with resettling displaced people. In the 1970s she founded Tana Press and Flora Nwapa Books to publish her own work and children's literature, which made her one of the first African women to run a publishing house. She also held academic posts and lectured abroad in the years before her death in 1993.
Notable achievements
- Published Efuru in 1966, the first internationally published English-language novel by a Nigerian woman
- Author of Idu, One is Enough, Never Again and Women are Different
- Founded Tana Press, one of the first publishing houses run by an African woman
- Served as a commissioner in the East Central State government after the civil war
Legacy
Nwapa's novels put the working lives of Igbo women — trade, marriage, childlessness, standing in the community — at the centre of Nigerian fiction, and later Nigerian women writers routinely cite her as the opening of that ground.