Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie Bio

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, (born September 15, 1977, Enugu, Nigeria), is a Nigerian author and speaker. She grew up on the campus of the University of Nigeria, Nsukka where she studied medicine for a year before proceeding to the US at the age of 19 to continue her education on a different path. She graduated summa cum laude from Eastern Connecticut State University with a degree in Communication and Political Science. After graduating from her University, Adichie received a master’s degree in creative writing from Johns Hopkins University and studied African history at Yale University.

Her first novel, Purple Hibiscus (2003), won the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize. Her second fictional work, Half of a Yellow Sun (2006), won the Orange Prize. In 2008 Adichie received a MacArthur Foundation fellowship. The following year she released The Thing Around Your Neck, a critically acclaimed collection of short stories. Her next novel, titled, Americanah won the US National Book Critics Circle Award and was named one of The New York Times Top Ten Best Books of 2013.

In 2015, Adichie was named on TIME Magazine’s 100 Most Influential People in the World. In 2017, Fortune Magazine named her one of the World’s 50 Greatest Leaders. In 2009, she delivered an eloquently ravishing TED Talk titled, The Danger of A Single Story. In 2012, she gave yet another landmark TEDxEuston talk, We Should All Be Feminists, which started a worldwide conversation about feminism. Her speech was published as a book in 2014.