Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Chimamanda N. Adichie
Nationality	Nigerian
Period	2003-present
Notable works	Purple Hibiscus Half of a Yellow Sun

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (born September 15, 1977) is an acclaimed Nigerian writer. She comes from Abba in Anambra State, southeast Nigeria.

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.

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 for 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. Chimamanda is a 2008 MacArthur Fellow.

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?