[1] The series has provided an international audience for many African writers, including Chinua Achebe, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, Steve Biko, Ama Ata Aidoo, Nadine Gordimer, Buchi Emecheta, and Okot p'Bitek.

He finds that Achebe remains largely unknown in his home country of Nigeria due to the small print run and high price of his first novel.

[4] 1960 – Heinemann Educational Books (HEB) is set up as a separate company run by Alan Hill with Tony Beal as his deputy, and begins to publicise Achebe in Africa.

Hill explains that the plan was "to start a paperback series, confined to black African authors; the books were to be attractively designed with high quality production, and sold at a very cheap price—as low as 25p at the outset".

[6][7] 1962 – Alan Hill, Tony Beal and Van Milne launch the African Writers Series with a paperback edition of Things Fall Apart, followed by Cyprian Ekwensi's Burning Grass, and then Kenneth Kaunda's autobiography Zambia Shall Be Free.

[5][8] 1964 – Sambrook is concerned that the early selections for the series will not reach the educational market, particularly after the inclusion of Zambia Shall Be Free.

The first result is A Book of African Verse edited by Clive Wake and John Reed, teachers at the University College of Rhodesia.

[5] 1972 – Chinua Achebe leaves his position following the publication of his short story collection Girls At War as the hundredth book in the series.

The decision to reissue paperback editions of English-language hardbacks followed the early success of Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart and continued for many years.

[1] Novels would make up the bulk of the series, but it extended to poetry, anthologies, short stories, autobiographies, drama, non fiction, and oral traditions.

[1] Between 1962 and 1986, all the books in the African Writers Series were colour-coded: orange for fiction, blue for non-fiction, and green for poetry and drama.

While this highlighted the different genres, all books in the series during this period were numbered to give a clear indication that they belonged to a collection of works by African writers.

[16] The African Writers Series includes five winners of the Nobel Prize for Literature: Wole Soyinka (1986), Naguib Mahfouz (1988), Nadine Gordimer (1991), Doris Lessing (2007), and Abdulrazak Gurnah (2021).

[citation needed] It was then relaunched by Pearson Education in 2011, which began reissuing titles from the original list as 'Classics' and a number of new works.