Work and Critical Reception
Elechi Amadi has said that his first publication was in 1957, a poem entitled "Penitence" in a University of Ibadan campus magazine called The Horn, edited by John Pepper Clark.
Amadi's first novel, The Concubine, was published in London in 1966 and was hailed as a "most accomplished first performance". Alastair Niven in his critical study of the novel wrote: "Rooted firmly among the hunting and fishing villages of the Niger delta, The Concubine nevertheless possesses the timelessness and universality of a major novel." The Concubine was made into a film, written by Elechi Amadi and directed by accomplished Nollywood film director Andy Amenechi, which premiered in Abuja in March 2007.
The setting of Amachi's second novel, The Great Ponds, published in 1969, is pre-colonial Eastern Nigeria, and is about the battle between two village communities over possession of a pond.
In 1973 Amadi autobiographical non-fiction, Sunset in Biafra, was published. It records his personal experiences in the Nigeria-Biafra war, and according to Niven "is written in a compelling narrative form as though it were a novel".
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