Books by Olaudah Equiano

Olaudah Equiano (c.1745-97) was born in Nigeria and sold into slavery as a child. His successful 1789 autobiography boosted the abolitionist cause and remains a classic account of the horrors of the transatlantic slave trade. It is also a significant work of black British history and literature.

The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano or Gustavus Vassa, the African. Written by Himself was the first work that influenced the nineteenth-century genre of slave narrative autobiographies. Written and published by Equiano, a former slave, it became a prototype for those that followed.

Recounts the kidnapping of the author in Africa aged ten, his service as a slave of an officer in the British Navy for ten years, and his life after he bought his freedom in 1766, growing to become one of the foremost figures of the anti-slavery movement in Britain. This autobiography presents a tale of spiritual quest.

The text of Equiano's narrative presented here is that of the 1789 first edition.