Chinua Achebe wins $120,000 2007 Man Booker Prize

Chinua Achebe has won the 2007 Man Booker International Prize for fiction. The $120,000 prize is awarded every two years for a body of fiction.

Interesting times for Nigerian literature and the world is beginning to pay attention. Earlier in the month Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie won the Orange Prize for fiction, one of the literary world's top awards for women writers.

Weve had our fair share of bad press and a negative image in Nigeria. But moments like this remind us to take pride in who we really are and not what a few bad eggs make us out to be. We are a people with a wealth of natural talent. We just have to find a way to harness it and we will be great.

The International Man Booker award is granted every two years to a living author for his achievements in fiction. Elaine Showalter, who headed the judging panel, said the winner had "inaugurated the modern African novel."

Chinua Achebe now 76, has written more than 20 books - including novels, short stories, essays and poetry - but is best known for his first novel Things Fall Apart (1958), and for another published more than 30 years later, Anthills of the Savannah.