Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie facts for kids
Quick facts for kids
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
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Adichie in 2015
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| Born |
Amanda Ngozi Adichie
15 September 1977 Enugu, Enugu State, Nigeria
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| Years active | 2003–present |
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Notable work
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Purple Hibiscus (2003), Half of a Yellow Sun (2006), "The Danger of a Single Story" (2009), Americanah (2013), We Should All Be Feminists (2014) |
| Spouse(s) |
Ivara Esege
(m. 2009) |
| Children | 1 |
| Awards | Full list |
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (
i/ˌtʃɪməˈmɑːndə əŋˈɡoʊzi əˈdiːtʃi.eɪ/ ); born 15 September 1977, is a Nigerian author and activist. Regarded as a central figure in postcolonial feminist literature, she is the author of the novels Purple Hibiscus (2003), Half of a Yellow Sun (2006) and Americanah (2013). Her other works include the book of essays We Should All Be Feminists (2014); Dear Ijeawele, or A Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions (2017); a memoir, Notes on Grief (2021); and a children's book, Mama's Sleeping Scarf (2023).
Born and raised in Enugu, Adichie studied medicine and pharmacology for a year and half at the University of Nigeria. At 19, she left Nigeria for the United States to study at Drexel University, and would later study at three universities: Eastern Connecticut State University, Johns Hopkins University, and Yale University. She first published Decisions, a poetry collection, in 1997, which she followed with a play, For Love of Biafra, in 1998. She published Purple Hibiscus in 2003. Her father's story during the war supplied material for her second novel Half of a Yellow Sun.
Citing Chinua Achebe and Buchi Emecheta as inspiration, Adichie's style juxtaposes Western and African influences, with particular influence from the Igbo culture. Most of her works, including her writing and speeches, explore the themes of religion, immigration, gender and culture. She also uses fashion as a medium to break down stereotypes, and was recognised with a Shorty Award in 2018 for her "Wear Nigerian Campaign". Adichie's 2009 TED Talk, "The Danger of a Single Story" is one of the most viewed TED Talks and her 2012 talk, "We Should All Be Feminists" was sampled by American singer Beyoncé as well as featured on a T-shirt by the French fashion house Dior in 2016. Adichie has received numerous academic awards, fellowships, and other honours, among them a MacArthur Fellowship in 2008 and induction into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2017.
Contents
Name
Bearing Amanda as her English name, she made up the Igbo name "Chimamanda" in the 1990s to keep her legal English name and conform with the Igbo Christian naming customs.
Life and career
Early life and family
Adichie was born on 15 September 1977 in Enugu, Enugu State, Nigeria to parents of Igbo origin. Her parents Grace (née Odigwe) and James Nwoye Adichie married on 15 April 1963. Adichie's father moved with his wife to Berkeley to complete his PhD at the University of California. James was born in Abba in Anambra State. He graduated in 1957 with a degree in mathematics at University College, Ibadan and began working as a professor at the University of Nigeria (UNN) in 1966. Adichie's mother was born in Umunnachi, also in Anambra State, and began her university studies in 1964 at Merritt College in Oakland. She later earned a degree in sociology and anthropology from University of Nigeria Nsukka .
When the Biafran War broke out in 1967, James started working for the Biafran government at the Biafran Manpower Directorate. Adichie lost her maternal and paternal grandfathers during the war. After Biafra ceased to exist in 1970, James returned to UNN while Grace worked for the government in Enugu until 1973 when she became an administration officer at UNN, and later the first female registrar. Her siblings include Ijeoma Rosemary, Uchenna "Uche", Chukwunweike "Chuks", Okechukwu "Okey", and Kenechukwu "Kene". The family stayed at the University of Nigeria campus in the house previously occupied by Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe. Adichie was raised Catholic, and the family's parish was St. Paul's Parish in Abba. Adichie's father died of kidney failure in 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic, and her mother died in 2021.
Secondary school and university
Adichie began her formal education, which included both Igbo and English. Although Igbo was not a popular subject, she continued taking courses in the language throughout high school. She completed her secondary education at the University of Nigeria Campus Secondary School, with top distinction in the West African Examinations Council (WAEC), and numerous academic prizes. She was admitted to the University of Nigeria, where she studied medicine and pharmacy for a year and half, and served as the editor of The Compass, a student-run magazine in the university. In 1997, at the age of 19, Adichie published Decisions, a collection of poems, and moved to the United States to study communications at Drexel University in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. In 1998, she wrote a play called For Love of Biafra. Her early works were written under the name Amanda N. Adichie.
Two years after moving to the United States, Adichie transferred to Eastern Connecticut State University in Willimantic, Connecticut, where she lived with her sister Ijeoma, who was a medical doctor there. In 2000, she published her short story "My Mother, the Crazy African", which discusses the problems that arise when a person is facing two completely opposite cultures. After finishing her undergraduate degree, she continued studying and simultaneously pursued a writing career. While a senior at Eastern Connecticut, she wrote articles for the university paper Campus Lantern. She received her bachelor's degree summa cum laude with a major in political science and a minor in communications in 2001. She later earned a master's degree in creative writing from Johns Hopkins University in 2003 and, for the next two years, was a Hodder Fellow at Princeton University, where she taught introductory fiction. She began studying at Yale University, and completed a second master's degree in African studies in 2008. Adichie received a MacArthur Fellowship that same year, plus other academic prizes, including the 2011–2012 Fellowship of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University.
Inspiration and marriage
As a child, Adichie read only English-language stories especially by Enid Blyton. Her juvenilia included stories with characters who were white and blue-eyed, modeled on British children she had read about. At ten, she discovered African literature and read Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe, The African Child by Camara Laye, Weep Not, Child by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, and Joys of Motherhood by Buchi Emecheta. Adichie began to study her father's Biafran stories when she was thirteen. In visits to Abba, she saw destroyed houses and rusty bullets scattered on the ground, and would later incorporate them and her father's accounts into her novels.
Adichie married Ivara Esege, a Nigerian doctor, in 2009, and their daughter was born in 2016. The family primarily lives in the United States because of Esege's medical practice, but they also maintain a home in Nigeria. Adichie has Nigerian nationality and permanent resident status in the US.
Writing background
While studying in the US, Adichie started researching and writing her first novel, Purple Hibiscus. She wrote it during a period of homesickness and set it in her childhood home of Nsukka. The book explores post-colonial Nigeria during a military coup d'état, examines the cultural conflicts between Christianity and Igbo traditions, and touches on themes of class, gender, race, and violence. She sent her manuscript to publishing houses and literary agents, who either rejected it or requested that she change the setting from Africa to America to make it more familiar to a broader range of readers. Eventually, Djana Pearson Morris, a literary agent working at Pearson Morris and Belt Literary Management, accepted the manuscript. Although Morris recognised that marketing would be challenging, since Adichie was Black but neither African-American nor Caribbean. She submitted the manuscript to publishers until it was eventually accepted by Algonquin Books, a small independent company, in 2003. Algonquin published the manuscript and created support for the book by providing advance copies to booksellers, reviewers, and media houses, and sponsoring Adichie on a promotional tour. They also sent the manuscript to Fourth Estate, who accepted the book for publication in the United Kingdom in 2004. During that period, Adichie hired an agent, Sarah Chalfant of the Wylie Agency, to represent her. Purple Hibiscus was later published by Kachifo Limited in Nigeria in 2004, and subsequently translated into more than 40 languages.
After her first book, Adichie began writing Half of a Yellow Sun, which she researched for four years, including studying Buchi Emecheta's 1982 novel Destination Biafra. The book was published in 2006 by Anchor Books, a trade-paperback imprint of Alfred A. Knopf, which also released the book later under its Vintage Canada label. It was also published in France as L'autre moitié du soleil in 2008, by Éditions Gallimard. The novel expands on the Biafran conflict, weaving together a love story that includes people from various regions and social classes of Nigeria, and how the war and encounters with refugees changes them.
While completing her Hodder and MacArthur fellowships, Adichie published short stories in various magazines. Twelve of these stories were collected into her third book, The Thing Around Your Neck, published by Knopf in 2009. The stories focuses on the experiences of Nigerian women, living at home or abroad, examining the tragedies, loneliness, and feelings of displacement resulting from their marriages, relocations, or violent events. The Thing Around Your Neck was a bridge between Africa and the African diaspora, which was also the theme of her fourth book, Americanah, published in 2013. It was the story of a young Nigerian woman and her male schoolmate, who had not studied the trans-Atlantic slave trade in school and had no understanding of the racism associated with being Black in the United States or class structures in the United Kingdom. It explores the central message of a "shared Black consciousness", as both of the characters, one in Britain and the other in America, experiences a loss of their identity when they try to navigate their lives abroad.
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Adichie was invited to be a visiting writer at the University of Michigan in Flint in 2014. The Renowned African Writers/African and African Diaspora Artists Visit Series required her to engage with students and teachers from high schools and universities, patrons of the local public library, and the community at large through forums, workshops, and lectures that discussed Purple Hibiscus, Americanah, and her personal writing experiences. Clips from her talks "The Danger of a Single Story" and "We Should All Be Feminists" were also aired at some of the events and discussed in the question-and-answer segment following her presentations. In 2015, Adichie wrote a letter to a friend and posted it on Facebook in 2016. Comments on the post convinced her to turn to a book, Dear Ijeawele, or A Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions, which was an expansion of her ideas on how to raise a feminist daughter. The book was published in 2017. In 2020, Adichie published "Zikora", a stand-alone short story about sexism and single motherhood, and an essay "Notes on Grief" in The New Yorker, after her father's death. She expanded the essay into a book of the same name, which was published by Fourth Estate the following year.
In 2020, Adichie adapted We Should All Be Feminists for children, in an edition illustrated by Leire Salaberria. Translations of it were authorised for publication in Croatian, French, Korean, Portuguese, and Spanish. Adichie spent a year and a half writing her first children's book, Mama's Sleeping Scarf, which was published in 2023 by HarperCollins under the pseudonym "Nwa Grace James". Joelle Avelino, a Congolese-Angolan artist, illustrated the book. The book tells the story of the connections between generations through family interactions with a head scarf.
Style
Language
Adichie uses both Igbo and English in her works, with Igbo phrases shown in italics and followed by an English translation. She uses figures of speech, especially metaphors, to trigger sensory experiences. For example, in Purple Hibiscus, the arrival of a king to challenge colonial and religious leaders symbolises Palm Sunday, and the usage of language referencing Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart invokes the memories of his work to her readers. Similarly, the name of Kambili, a character in Purple Hibiscus, evokes "i biri ka m biri" ("Live and Let Live"), the title of a song by Igbo musician Oliver De Coque. To describe pre- and post-war conditions, she moves from good to worse as seen in Half of a Yellow Sun, in which one of her characters begins by opening the refrigerator and sees oranges, beer, and a "roasted shimmering chicken". These contrast to later in the novel where one of her characters dies of starvation, and others are forced to eat powdered eggs and lizards.
Adichie usually uses real places and historic figures to draw readers into her stories.
Culture
In developing characters, Adichie often exaggerates attitudes to contrast the differences between traditional and western cultures. Her stories often point out failed cultures, particularly those which leave her characters in a limbo between bad options. At times, she creates a character as an oversimplified archetype of a particular aspect of cultural behavior to create a foil for a more complex character.
Igbo tradition
Adichie gives her characters recognisable common names for an intended ethnicity, such as Mohammed for a Muslim character. For Igbo characters, she invents names that convey Igbo naming traditions and depict the character's traits, personality, and social connections. For example, in Half of a Yellow Sun, the character's name Ọlanna literally means "God's Gold", but Nwankwọ points out that ọla means precious and nna means father (which can be understood as either God the father or a parent). By shunning popular Igbo names, Adichie intentionally imbues her characters with multi-ethnic, gender-plural, global personas. She typically does not use English names for African characters but, when she does, it is a device to represent negative traits or behaviours.
Adichie draws on figures from Igbo oral tradition to present facts in the style of historical fiction. She breaks with tradition in a way that contrasts with traditional African literature, given that women writers were often absent from the Nigerian literary canon, and female characters were often overlooked or served as supporting material for male characters who were engaged in the socio-political and economic life of the community. Her style often focuses on strong women and adds a gendered perspective to topics previously explored by other authors, such as colonialism, religion, and power relationships.
Adichie often separates characters into social classes to illustrate social ambiguities and traditional hierarchies. By using narratives from characters of different segments of society, as she reiterates in her TED talk, "The Danger of a Single Story", she conveys the message that there is no single truth about the past. Adichie is encouraging her readers to recognise their own responsibility to one another, and the injustice that exists in the world. Nigerian scholar Stanley Ordu classifies Adichie's feminism as womanist because her analysis of patriarchal systems goes beyond sexist treatment of women and anti-male bias, looking instead at socio-economic, political and racial struggles women face to survive and cooperate with men. For example, in Purple Hibiscus, the character Auntie Ifeoma embodies a womanist view through making all family members to work as a team and with consensus, so that each person's talents are utilised to their highest potential.
In both her written works and public speaking, Adichie incorporates humour, and uses anecdotes, irony and satire to underscore a particular point of view. Adichie has increasingly developed a contemporary Pan-Africanist view of gender issues, becoming less interested in the way the West sees Africa and more interested in how Africa sees itself.
Themes
Adichie, in a 2011 conversation with Kenyan writer Binyavanga Wainaina, stated that the overriding theme of her works was love. Adichie's works, beginning with Purple Hibiscus, generally examine cultural identity.
Adichie's works about African diaspora consistently examine themes of belonging, adaptation and discrimination. Her works show a deep interest in the complexities of the human condition. Recurrent themes are forgiveness and betrayal. Her narrative demonstrates that knowledge and understanding of diverse classes and ethnic groups is necessary to create harmonious multi-ethnic communities.
Public speaking
In 2009, Adichie delivered a TED Talk titled "The Danger of a Single Story." In the talk, Adichie expressed her concern that accepting one version of a story perpetrates myths and stereotypes because it fails to recognise the complexities of human life and situations. She argued that under-representation of the layers that make up a person's identity or culture deprives them of their humanity.
On 15 March 2012, Adichie became the youngest person to deliver a Commonwealth Lecture. The presentation was given at the Guildhall in London addressing the theme "Connecting Cultures".
Adichie accepted an invitation to speak in London in 2012, at TEDxEuston. Adichie has spoken at many commencement ceremonies, including at Williams College (2017), Harvard University (2018), and the American University (2019). Adichie was the first African to speak at Yale University's Class Day (2019).
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Adichie has been the keynote speaker at numerous global conferences.
Legacy
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Larissa MacFarquhar of The New Yorker stated that Adichie is "regarded as one of the most vital and original novelists of her generation". Her works have been translated into more than 30 languages.
Adichie's book Half of a Yellow Sun was adapted into a film of the same title directed by Biyi Bandele in 2013. In 2018, a painting of Adichie was included in a wall mural at the Municipal Sport Center in the Concepción barrio of Madrid, along with fourteen other historically influential women. The fifteen women were selected by members of the neighborhood to give a visible representation of the role of women in history and to serve as a symbol of equality. The neighborhood residents defeated a move by conservative politicians to remove the mural in 2021 through a petition drive of collected signatures.
Awards and honours
In 2002, Adichie was shortlisted for the Caine Prize for African Writing for her story, "You in America." She also won the BBC World Service Short Story Competition for "That Harmattan Morning", while her short story "The American Embassy" won the 2003 O. Henry Award and the David T. Wong International Short Story Prize from PEN International. Her book, Purple Hibiscus was well received with positive reviews from book critics. The book sold well and was awarded the Commonwealth Writers' Prize for the Best Book (2005), Hurston-Wright Legacy Award, and shortlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction (2004). Half of a Yellow Sun garnered acclaim including winning the Orange Prize for Fiction in 2007, the International Nonino Prize (2009), and the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award. Her story collection, The Thing Around Your Neck was the runner-up to the Dayton Literary Peace Prize for 2010. One story from the book, "Ceiling" was included in The Best American Short Stories 2011. Americanah was listed among The New York Times "10 Best Books of 2013", and won the National Book Critics Circle Award (2014), and the One City One Book (2017). Her book Dear Ijeawele, translated in French as Chère Ijeawele, ou un manifeste pour une éducation féministe won the Le Grand Prix de l'Héroïne Madame Figaro in the category of best non-fiction book in 2017.
Adichie was a finalist of the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction (2014). She won the Barnard Medal of Distinction (2016), and the W. E. B. Du Bois Medal (2022), the highest honour from Harvard University. She was listed in The New Yorker's "20 Under 40" authors in 2010, and the Africa39 under 40 authors during the Hay Festival in 2014, She was listed in Time 100 in 2015, and The Africa Report's list of the "100 Most Influential Africans" in 2019. In 2018, she was selected as the winner of the PEN Pinter Prize, which recognises writers whose body of literary work uncovers truth through critical analysis of life and society. The award recipient chooses the winner of the companion prize, the Pinter International Writer of Courage Award, for which Adichie named Waleed Abulkhair, a Saudi Arabian lawyer and human rights activist. The Women's Prize for Fiction, formerly known as the Orange Prize, selected 25 candidates for its Winner of Winners in honour of its 25th anniversary celebrations in 2020. The public chose Adichie for Half of a Yellow Sun for the award.
In 2017, Adichie was elected as one of 228 new members to be inducted into the 237th class of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, making her the second Nigerian to be given the honour after Wole Soyinka. As of March 2022, Adichie had received 16 honorary degrees from universities
President of Nigeria Muhammadu Buhari selected her to be honoured as a recipient of the Order of the Federal Republic in 2022, but Adichie rejected the national distinction. On 30 December 2022, Adichie was made the "Odeluwa" of Abba, a Nigerian chief, by the kingdom of Abba in her native Anambra State; she was the first woman to receive such an honour from the kingdom.
