Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie Biography

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (born 1977) is a Nigerian novelist and memoirist whose work has won numerous awards and has been translated into more than 30 languages.

Adichie was born in Enugu, Nigeria, and grew up in Nsukka, where her parents both worked for the University of Nigeria. She was a medical student at the university for a year before moving to the United States to complete her education at age 19. She attended Eastern Connecticut State University and went on to graduate school at Johns Hopkins University and Yale.

Purple Hibiscus, Adichie’s first novel, was published in 2003 and won the 2005 Best First Book Commonwealth Writer’s Prize. Her second novel, Half of a Yellow Sun, was published in 2006 and won the 2007 Orange Prize for Fiction, and the 2013 novel Americanah received that year’s U.S. National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction. Adichie is also known for her 2009 TED talk “The Danger of a Single Story” and the 2012 TEDxEuston talk “We Should All Be Feminists,” which formed the basis of the 2014 publication of the same name. Her memoir about mourning the loss of her father, Notes on Grief, was published in 2021. Adichie has won numerous fellowships, awards, and accolades. She was named one of Time magazine’s100 Most Influential People in the World in 2015, and, in 2017, one of the World’s 50 Greatest Leaders by Fortune magazine.