of a hero of the Ijaw people, which is celebrated every 25 years in the Niger Delta, in the original language in his drama Ozidi, adapted it dramatically and translated it into English. He turned the folkloric symbolism into the psychoanalytical. The only representative of négritude in Nigeria was considered to be the essayist and literary scholar Abiola Irele, who became the director of the journal Black Orpheus in 1968. He criticised the overemphasis on ideological differences between the English- and French-speaking writers of Africa. As early as the 1950s, popular metropolitan literature based on the American model emerged in Nigeria, published in booklets distributed in the market, the so-called Onitsha market literature, of which Cyprian Ekwensi was probably the most important representative. Ekwensi, the son of a storyteller, wrote hundreds of short stories as well as 35 novels and children's books. His best-known work is Jagua Nana (1961), a description of the life of an ageing sex worker that is not free of stereotypes. Considered the most important founding figure of English-language literature in West Africa, Chinua Achebe, winner of the 2002 Peace Prize of the German Book Trade, made his debut as a novelist and poet with Things Fall Apart (1958), which, along with No Longer at Ease (1960), is his magnum opus. His novels place African heroes at the crossroads of two worlds: a Western world with an abstract rationality devoid of justice and an Africa whose outmoded traditional values handicap its subjects for the new age. He is one of the best-known English-language African authors. That is why he has been considered for the Nobel Prize in Literature several times. Things Fall Apart describes an Africa before the arrival of Europeans and which carries old values that Achebe wants to emphasise. The book reached a circulation of 400,000 copies in 1969 and three million copies in 1987. It has been translated into 45 languages. In Anthills of the Savannah (1987), he describes an Africa gripped by corruption and the false position of intellectuals, where women are the future. Chinua Achebe was awarded the Man Booker International prize in recognition of his entire career as a novelist and author in 2007. In awarding the prize, Nadine Gordimer referred to Achebe as "the father of modern African literature". After the Biafra war Flora Nwapa began her career as a writer while teaching at Queen's School in Enugu. Two