payment page
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie Background
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie was born on September 15, 1977, in Enugu, Nigeria, and grew up in Nsukka, where the University of Nigeria is located. Her parents worked for the university, her father as a professor, and her mother as the first female registrar in the university. Her family is Igbo, one of the three major ethnic groups of Nigeria, along with the Yoruba and Hausa. Although she began studying medicine at the University of Nigeria, Adichie longed to study the humanities, and later received a scholarship to Drexel University in Philadelphia to change her course of study. After two years, she transferred to Eastern Connecticut University, where she graduated summa cum laude with a BA in political science and communications. She then attended Johns Hopkins University for her MFA in creative writing, and later received an MA in African studies from Yale University. Since then she has won numerous fellowships and awards, including a MacArthur Genius Grant in 2008. She now teaches in Nigeria and the United States.
Adichie’s first novel, Purple Hibiscus, was published in 2003, and won the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best First Book in 2005. Following that, she wrote two novels, Half of a Yellow Sun and Americanah, plus numerous essays and short stories. In addition to her fiction, Adichie is well known as a speaker and essayist. Her two extremely popular TED Talks highlight themes that she explores throughout her creative work, and quite clearly in Americanah . At 2009’s TED Global Conference she presented, “The Danger of a Single Story,” which discusses the consequences of stereotypes in both fiction and reality. Her 2012 TED Talk, “We Should All Be Feminists,” addressed the importance of raising both daughters and sons to create a fairer world. It has been downloaded millions of times and republished in book form. In 2013, Beyoncé sampled the talk on her song “***Flawless,” bringing Adichie’s message to the wider public.
