Buchi Emecheta turned hardship into art, writing stories that honoured the lives of women too often ignored. Drawing from her own journey from Lagos to London, she explored migration, motherhood, and survival with piercing clarity.

Her debut works, In the Ditch and Second-Class Citizen, followed a young Nigerian woman struggling in Britain, while The Joys of Motherhood and The Slave Girl laid bare the weight of tradition, colonialism and gender in Nigerian life. Over more than twenty novels, she examined silence, resistance, and the fierce will to live freely.

Emecheta’s prose was direct and full of care. In telling women’s stories on their own terms, she redefined who could belong at the centre of African literature.