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At Town Hall on February 26, the PEN American Center will host a star-studded tribute to Nigerian author Chinua Achebe. This literary gala, co-sponsored by Anchor Books and Bard College, will gather fellow luminaries like Toni Morrison, Ha Jin, and Colum McCann to honor the 78-year-old polymath, who remains one of African fiction's most authentic and prophetic voices.

Although Achebe has been internationally famous since 1958, when his first novel, Things Fall Apart, was published by London's Heinemann Press, subsequent decades have only expanded his impressive résumé. Things Fall Apart wasn't the first African novel written in English, but it remains one of the most significant and best known. Two years before Britain granted Nigeria its independence, Achebe's fictionalized critique of cultural imperialism did for colonialism what Uncle Tom's Cabin did for American slavery. A commemorative edition arrives this month from Vintage/Anchor to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Achebe's debut and his winning of the 2007 Man Booker International Prize, which honored his entire body of published work—his novels, critical essays, poetry, short stories, children's books, and anthologies of African short fiction.

I met with the charismatic Achebe at his home on the Bard College campus in Annandale-on-Hudson, where he has taught since a 1990 car accident in Nigeria bound him to a wheelchair. During our conversation, this soft-spoken, gently ironic intellectual reveals himself as a shrewd, fearless pacifist, who—while famous for fictionalizing the political tragedies of his native land—nevertheless retains boundless hope for the future of Africans at home and abroad.

Because last year's Man Booker prize collectively honors everything you've written thus far, it's almost as if you're being invited to begin a whole new chapter of literary production. Do you feel on the cusp of new fiction or essays based upon speculative cures for Africa's current problems? I have a book of autobiographical essays as my definitive statement on my life and work. I also have two new novels I would like to complete and publish as soon as possible. One is very strange. . . . It's a translation of Things Fall Apart back into the Igbo language from which it came!

You've said that Things Fall Apart was the result of "a conversation" between the English language and Igbo, your mother tongue. Did this trigger some sort of semantic collision that mirrors the apocalyptic culture clash described in the novel? When I decided to write a novel which would deal with the colonizing presence of Britain in my life and in my country, I realized I had to start a conversation between these two languages, which is how the book was conceived. I knew that in some way the meeting of these two languages would define my literary identity.

Things Fall Apart proved that one can be constructively critical of questionable cultural practices—like selective infanticide and ritualized executions—without steeping those critiques in racist contempt. Why do you think the West cannot see ancient tribal cultural norms as comparable to controversial Western conventions like capital punishment and pro-choice abortion? That's a question I would like to ask them myself, but I think I know the answer: They cannot, in view of their history, engage in that kind of discussion. They have told themselves there is nothing they can learn from other peoples, especially those they have taken over and derided. So rather than turn around and begin to see something of value in our customs or cultures, they would rather stick with their original judgment.