Chinua Achebe has received the global Booker prize. The biennial £60,000 prize is a life-time acheivement award, which can be won by an author of any nationality whose work is available in English.

Achebe - regularly described as the father of modern African literature - is a novelist, poet and essayist. Colm Toibin, one of the judges, said that in THINGS FALL APART Achebe "manages to capture an essential moment in the colonial dama; it dramatises momentous change with clarity, sympathy and astonishing fluency and ease".

The shortlist also included: Doris Lessing, Carlos Fuentes, Salman Rushdie, Philip Roth, Don DeLillo, Margaret Atwood and Amos Oz.

www.manbookerinternational.com