Oral and early written traditions
Long before Nigerian literature existed in English, its major language communities carried substantial oral traditions of praise poetry, folktales, proverbs, and epic narrative, transmitted through performance rather than print S1. In the north, Islamic scholarship generated a written literature of its own well before colonial contact: Hausa-speaking scholars produced Ajami, an Arabic-script rendering of Hausa, from the early nineteenth century onward, a tradition separate from and older than the English-language novel that would later dominate the country's literary reputation abroad S1. Written literacy in Latin script arrived later, spread through European and African Christian missionaries operating from Sierra Leone, whose schools and presses in the nineteenth century laid groundwork for the English-language literary culture that followed S1
The first generation
The first generation of Nigerian authors, writing primarily in English between the 1930s and the 1960s, set out to answer colonial depictions of Africans as peoples without history or culture by making indigenous tradition and society the direct subject of serious fiction S1. D. O. Fagunwa pioneered the incorporation of Yoruba oral narrative technique into the novel form, producing five Yoruba-language novels between 1938 and 1961 S1. Amos Tutuola extended that fusion into English with The Palm-Wine Drinkard and His Dead Palm-Wine Tapster in the Deads' Town (1952), written in an idiosyncratic, non-standard English that drew directly on Yoruba idiom and folklore and brought Tutuola early international recognition S1. Cyprian Ekwensi's People of the City (1954) turned instead to the texture of urban Lagos life and is credited as the first African novel of this era to gain wide international attention, helping to spark the related Onitsha market literature movement among Igbo popular writers S1
Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart (1958), published in London by Heinemann, became the generation's defining novel, following the Igbo leader Okonkwo through the arrival of missionaries and colonial administration in the 1890s S2. The book had been rejected by publishers wary of a novel by an African writer before being accepted; it has since sold more than 20 million copies and been translated into more than 50 languages S2. Achebe's emergence coincided with a cluster of literary institutions centred on Ibadan and its university, including The Horn magazine, the Black Orpheus review, and the Mbari Club, which gave the period's writers and poets a shared outlet and audience S1. Wole Soyinka, who studied English at the University of Leeds before returning to Nigeria, first demonstrated his theatrical range at the country's 1960 independence celebrations, and the poet Christopher Okigbo published his collection Heavensgate in 1962, work later regarded as placing Nigerian poetry alongside its Francophone African counterparts S1
Post-independence and the civil war generation
Independence in 1960 did not settle the questions the first generation had raised; the Nigerian Civil War (1967–1970) instead pushed the same writers, and those who followed them, toward more directly political and often autobiographical work S3. Soyinka's public call for a ceasefire during the war led to his arrest in 1967 and 22 months of imprisonment without trial, an experience he recorded in the prison memoir The Man Died: Prison Notes (1972) S3. He went on to publish the novel Season of Anomy (1973) and the critical study Myth, Literature and the African World (1975), continuing to combine literary and political work through Nigeria's military-era decades S3. Achebe likewise published further novels in this period, including A Man of the People (1966) and later Anthills of the Savannah (1987), sustaining a body of work that traced Nigeria's politics from the late colonial period through military rule S2. In 1986, the Swedish Academy awarded Soyinka the Nobel Prize in Literature, making him the first African laureate in the category; the prize cited his work as fashioned in a wide cultural perspective with poetic overtones S3
The contemporary generation
A later generation of Nigerian writers, publishing from the late 1990s and 2000s onward, extended the tradition into new settings and forms while continuing to engage with the country's twentieth-century history. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, born in Enugu in 1977 and raised in Nsukka, studied in the United States before publishing her debut novel Purple Hibiscus in 2003, which won the Commonwealth Writers' Prize for Best First Book S4. Her second novel, Half of a Yellow Sun (2006), returned to the Nigerian Civil War as its subject and won the Orange Prize for Fiction in 2007, going on to be named the prize's best winner of its second decade in a later retrospective poll S4. Adichie received a MacArthur Fellowship in 2008, and her subsequent works, including the short-story collection The Thing Around Your Neck (2009) and the novel Americanah (2013), extended her international profile alongside widely viewed public talks including "The Danger of a Single Story" (2009) S4
An ongoing tradition
The line from Fagunwa's Yoruba oral-narrative novels through Tutuola, Ekwensi, Achebe, Soyinka, and Okigbo to Adichie's generation is continuous rather than a series of breaks, with each generation working in English, Yoruba, Hausa, or Igbo while drawing on the oral and Ajami traditions that preceded the novel form in Nigeria S1
A fuller roster of Nigerian authors, including many contemporary novelists, poets, and playwrights not detailed here, is maintained at notable nigerian authors.