Adaora Lily Ulasi

Adaora Lily Ulasi (born 1932) was a Nigerian journalist and novelist. She is said to have been the first West African woman to earn a degree in journalism.[1] As a journalist, she has worked for the BBC and Voice of America. As a novelist she wrote detective fiction in English, "adapting the genre of the crime thriller to an Igbo or Yoruba context".[2]

Adaora Lily Ulasi
Born1932
Aba, Eastern Nigeria
NationalityNigerian
OccupationJournalist and novelist
Notable work
Many Thing You No Understand (1970);
Many Thing Begin For Change (1971)
Spouse(s)Deryk James (div. 1972)
Children3

Biography

Born in Aba, Eastern Nigeria, daughter of an Igbo chief, she attended the local missionary school, but at the age of 15 was sent to the US to study. After graduating from high school she then studied at Pepperdine University and at the University of Southern California, earning a BA in journalism in 1954. She supplemented her income by writing the occasional newspaper column, working as a nanny, and as a film extra appearing, for example, in the 1953 film White Witch Doctor that starred Susan Hayward and Robert Mitchum.

In the 1960s she was women's page editor of the Daily Times of Nigeria. She subsequently married Deryk James and had three children Heather, Angela and Martin. After her divorce in 1972 she went to Nigeria as editor of Woman's World magazine, and in 1976 returned to England.

Her first novel, Many Thing You No Understand (1970), "controversially (for the first time) used pidgin English to dramatize the interaction between colonial officers and local people in the pre-independence era, as did her subsequent works, Many Thing Begin For Change (1971), Who Is Jonah? (1978) and The Man from Sagamu (1978). By contrast, The Night Harry Died (1974) is set in southern USA."[3] Ulasi worked at the Times Complex in Lagos, Nigeria.[4]

Bibliography
  • Many Thing You No Understand – London: Michael Joseph, 1970; Fontana, 1973
  • Many Thing Begin For Change – London: Michael Joseph, 1971; Fontana, 1975
  • The Night Harry Died – Lagos: Research Institute Nigeria, 1974
  • Who Is Jonah? – Ibadan: Onibonoje Press, 1978
  • The Man From Sagamu – London: Collins/Fontana, 1978; New York: Collier Macmillan, 1978

See also

References
  1. Chikwenye Okonjo Ogunyemi, "Adaora Lily Ulasi: Juju Fiction", Africa Wo/Man Palava: The Nigerian Novel by Women, University of Chicago Press, 1996 (Chapter Four, pp. 183–219), pp. 183–4.
  2. Lorna Sage, ed., The Cambridge Guide to Women's Writing in English, 1999
  3. Margaret Busby (ed.), Daughters of Africa: An International Anthology of Words and Writings by Women of African Descent, London: Jonathan Cape, 1992, p. 422.
  4. "56 Years of Nigerian Literature: Adaora Lily Ulasi". bookshy. Retrieved 27 May 2020.
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