Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Nigerian · born 1977

Born on September 15, 1977, in Enugu, Nigeria, the fifth of six children in an Igbo family from Anambra State, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie grew up on the campus of the University of Nigeria in Nsukka, in a house once occupied by Chinua Achebe. Her father was Nigeria's first professor of statistics; her mother was the university's first female registrar. Adichie discovered Achebe's Things Fall Apart at ten and understood for the first time that her own world could be the subject of literature; until then she had written stories peopled by white, blue-eyed children. She studied medicine for a year and a half at Nsukka before leaving Nigeria at nineteen for the United States, where she finished her degree at Eastern Connecticut State University and took a master's in creative writing at Johns Hopkins. Purple Hibiscus (2003), drafted as a student, was longlisted for the Booker. Half of a Yellow Sun (2006), which draws on her father's memories of the Biafran War in which both her grandfathers died, won the Orange Prize. Americanah (2013) followed a young Nigerian woman through American university life and back to a Lagos she could no longer fully read. Her TED talks The Danger of a Single Story (2009) and We Should All Be Feminists (2012) have been viewed tens of millions of times, the second sampled by Beyoncé and printed on a Dior T-shirt. She received a MacArthur Fellowship in 2008 and was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2017. She divides her time between Lagos and the United States, where she lives with her husband, the physician Ivara Esege, and their daughter.