Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Talk Description

Adichie will explore the ideas of identity and literature and how both have influenced her life as a fiction writer.

Biography

Chimamanda Adichie was born in Nigeria, in Abba in Anambra State, and grew up in Nsukka before moving to the US for college. Her degrees include a Masters in Creative Writing from Johns Hopkins and a Masters in African Studies from Yale. She is a recipient of a 2008 MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, and divides her time between the US and Nigeria, where she leads an African writers' workshop. Her award-winning books include Half of a Yellow Sun (winner of the Orange Broadband Prize, finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award), Purple Hibiscus (winner of the Commonwealth Writers' Prize and Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, shortlisted for the Orange Prize and John Llewellyn Rhys Prize, longlisted for the Booker Prize), and The Thing Around Your Neck (shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers' Prize). She contributes frequently to Granta, The New Yorker, The Guardian, and others, and was at work on a new novel at the time of her visit. Her work has been described as exploring “the intersection of the personal and public, placing the intimate details of lives within the larger social and political forces of contemporary Nigeria and America.”