[2] Rosina "Rose" Martin was born in Cheshire, England, and educated at Bedford College, University of London.
She taught Latin at Queens School, Enugu, until the outbreak of the Nigerian Civil War (1967–70).
[5] Umelo collected 12 of her short stories for adults into The Man Who Ate the Money (1978), five of which won awards.
[7] In 1967, the Eastern Region of Nigeria, whose capital was Enugu, seceded as the newly declared nation of Biafra.
This account, called "A World of our Own," remained unpublished until 2018, when it formed the core of a book, Surviving Biafra: A Nigerwife's Story (Hurst Publishers, London), co-authored with anthropologist S. Elizabeth Bird.