Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie has quickly established herself as a powerful author, storyteller, and advocate in literary and lecture circuits. She weaves themes of politics, culture, race, and gender throughout her novels, short stories, and plays, which have received both public and critical acclaim. Much of her work draws extensively on the Biafran War (also known as the Nigerian Civil War) during the late 1960s, and she unflinchingly describes the emotional turmoil of adolescence and the powerful bonds of family.
Adichie was born in Enugu, Nigeria, in 1977. She grew up on the campus of the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, where her father was a professor and her mother was the first female registrar. She was an avid reader from the age of four, and by seven she was writing and illustrating stories. Despite her love of words, her initial career path was studying medicine and pharmacy at the University of Nigeria.
After a year and a half, Adichie left for the United States and graduated summa cum laude in 2001 from Eastern Connecticut State University with a degree in communications and political science. She then earned a master’s in creative writing from Johns Hopkins University and a master’s in African history from Yale University in 2008. That same year, she was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship and a 2011-2012 fellowship by the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University. She has since been awarded sixteen honorary doctorate degrees from universities including Yale, the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Edinburgh, Duke University, Georgetown University, Johns Hopkins University, and the Catholic University of Louvain.
Adichie’s first novel, “Purple Hibiscus,” published in 2003, received widespread critical acclaim and was awarded the Commonwealth Writers' Prize for Best First Book and the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award. Her second novel, “Half of a Yellow Sun,” won the Orange Broadband Prize for Fiction and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. A collection of stories called “The Thing Around Your Neck” followed before her third novel, “Americanah,” was published in 2013. This work that explores a young Nigerian encountering racial issues in America won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction and the Heartland Prize for Fiction and is currently being adapted for film by Lupita Nyong’o.
Adichie’s powerful lectures include “The Danger of a Single Story,” “We Should All Be Feminists,” “Connecting Cultures,” and “Freedom of Speech.” In December 2022, she was made the Odeluwa of Abba, a Nigerian chief, by the kingdom of Abba in her native Anambra State. She was the first woman to receive such an honor from the kingdom.