The Nigerian literary icon Chinua Achebe has died at the age of 82. Achebe’s novels, including the highly celebrated “Things Fall Apart,” provided a counterpoint to the colonial depiction of Africa and helped give voice to a continent. In 2008, during a celebration of his birthday at the Library of Congress, Achebe was asked how the groundbreaking novel, published in 1958, had changed him.

Chinua Achebe: “The process of writing 'Things Fall Apart' actually changed my life, because I had to invent the language of that story. It was not something that anybody was teaching anywhere, the conversation between Igbo and English. That had not — and so I had to make it up as I went along.”

Achebe died in Boston after a brief illness.