FRANKFURT, Oct 13: Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe was honoured on Sunday with the prestigious German Book Trade Peace Prize in Frankfurt, hailed as a man building bridges between Africa and the West.

Some 700 persons, including former German President Friedrich von Weizsaecker and previous peace prize recipients Amos Oz of Israel and Assia Djebar of Algeria, attended the ceremonies at the Paulskirche church for Achebe, the 53rd recipient of the prize.

In a speech praising the 71-year-old eastern Nigerian writer, Wuerzburg University president Theodor Berchem cited Achebe’s role in bridging the cultures of Africa with the West.

Achebe becomes the third African to win what is one of the top cultural awards in Germany, after Senegalese President Leopold Senghor in 1968 and Djebar in 2000.

German Book Trade chairman Dieter Schormann called Achebe “a great humanist and a mediator between the cultures” and criticised Western industrial nations for showing so little interest in Africa.

The German Book Trade award jury cited Achebe for his efforts “on behalf of peace through justice” and hailed the Nigerian writer as being “one of the most powerful and at the same time most subtle voices of Africa in the literature of the 20th Century”.—dpa