Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
| Chimamanda N. Adichie | |
|---|---|
| Born | Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie September 15, 1977 Enugu, Enugu State, Nigeria |
| Nationality | Nigerian |
| Ethnicity | Igbo |
| Writing period | 2003-present |
| Notable work(s) | Purple Hibiscus Half of a Yellow Sun |
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Influences
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Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (born September 15, 1977) is an acclaimed Nigerian writer. She comes from Abba in Anambra State, southeast Nigeria. Her family is of Igbo descent.[1]
She was born in the town of Enugu but grew up in the university town of Nsukka in south-eastern Nigeria, where the University of Nigeria is situated. While she was growing up, her father was a professor of statistics at the University, and her mother was also employed there as the university registrar. At the age of 19, she left Nigeria and moved to the United States. After studying at Drexel University in Philadelphia, Chimamanda transferred to Eastern Connecticut State University to live closer to her sister; who had a medical practice in Coventry (now in Mansfield, Ct), and to continue studying communications and political science. She got her university degree from Eastern, where she graduated summa cum laude in 2001. She recently completed a master's degree in creative writing at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. She is now pursuing an MA in African Studies at Yale University. Chimamanda is a 2008 MacArthur Fellow[2]. She was a Visiting Writer at Wesleyan University, in 2008, and participated in Wesleyan's Distinguished Writers Series.[3]
- Her first novel, Purple Hibiscus, was published in 2003 and won the Best First Book award in the 2005 Commonwealth Writers' Prize.
- Her second novel, Half of a Yellow Sun, named after the flag of the short-lived Biafran nation, is set before and during the Biafran War. It was published by Knopf/Anchor in 2006 and was awarded the 2007 Orange Prize for Fiction.[4]
- Her third book is a collection of short stories titled The Thing Around Your Neck and was published in April 2009 by Fourth Estate in the UK and Knopf in the US.
[edit] References
- ^ Nixon, Rob (October 1, 2006). "A Biafran Story". The New York Times Company. http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/01/books/review/Nixon.t.html. Retrieved on 2009-1-25. "Adichie may not have lived through the civil war, but her imagination seems to have been profoundly molded by it: some of her own Igbo family survived Biafra; others did not."
- ^ David Kelly (23 September 2008). "MacArthurs, Parked". Papercuts (New York Times blog). http://papercuts.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/09/23/macarthurs-parked/. Retrieved on 24 March 2009.
- ^ [1] (Spring 2008)
- ^ UK Daily Telegraph "Nigerian author wins top literary prize" 7 June 2007
[edit] External links
- Short story by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie called "Half of a Yellow Sun"
- Article from The Guardian about Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie reaching the shortlist of the Orange
- The Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie Website (Unofficial)
- Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie at the Internet Book List
- Yale Biographical Information on Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
- The new face of Nigerian literature?
- Video: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie interview and reading at Sydney Writers' Festival May 2009
