The first book I wrote was The Bride Price which was a romantic book, but my husband burnt the book when he saw it. I was the typical African woman, I'd done this privately, I wanted him to look at it, approve it and he said he wouldn't read it.

While working to support her five children alone Buchi Emecheta earned a BSc degree in Sociology at the University of London. From 1969 to 1976 Buchi Emecheta was a youth worker and sociologist for the Inner London Education Authority and from 1976 to 1978 Buchi Emecheta was a community worker. British Home Secretary's Advisory Council on Race 1979.

Emecheta once described her stories as "stories of the world…[where]… women face the universal problems of poverty and oppression and the longer they stay no matter where they have come from originally the more the problems become identical. ". Her themes of child slavery motherhood female independence and freedom through education have won her considerable critical acclaim and honours including an Order of the British Empire in 2005.