Buchi Emecheta

Emecheta was born in Lagos to Igbo parents and married young, following her husband to London at seventeen; the marriage turned abusive and she left him in her twenties, raising five children alone while cleaning houses and working library jobs to support herself through a sociology degree. She wrote her early novels, including the autobiographical In the Ditch and Second-Class Citizen, in the fragments of time that work and motherhood left her.

The Joys of Motherhood, published in 1979, drew on the Igbo world of her own upbringing to follow a woman who sacrifices everything to her children only to find the customary rewards of motherhood have evaporated in a modernizing Lagos. Emecheta went on to found her own small publishing house to keep control of her books, wrote steadily across four decades, and lectured widely on African women's writing until her death in London in 2017.