Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie Biography, Facts, Books, Husband, Parents, Education, Net Worth

Alamu TosinJune 16, 2021

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie facts

Name: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Nationality: Nigerian
Profession: Writer
Net worth: $5 million

Chimamanda Adichie Biography

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, (born September 15, 1977, Enugu, Nigeria), Nigerian author whose work drew extensively on the Biafran war in Nigeria during the late 1960s.

Chimamand Ngozi Adichi is a Nigerian born writer. She started writing at a young age and has gone on to be listed as one of the 100 Most Influential People by the Time Magazine. She is known to be a feminist and has given voice to the people of African origin living in America and other countries. Her short stories are explicit about the Nigerian Civil war and the plight of the people caught in the conflict. Her poems and short stories have been compiled into books that turned out to be best sellers. She has published four books that convey a strong message about the issues that she believes require to be addressed. She has also delivered a number a talks and interviews on television where she has expressed her views strongly. She has been conferred with a number of awards and honorary degrees from various universities. Today she is a well-known name in literary circles and has made a lasting impact on the minds of her readers. She is also active on social media and has a large following on Facebook.

Chimamanda Adichie Age

On September 15, 1977, in the town of Enugu, in the nation of Nigeria, Africa, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie entered the world, making her the fifth of six children in this Adichie family. Soon after her birth, her family moved to the town of Nsukka, Nigeria

Chimamanda Adichie Early in life

Adichie, the fifth of six children, moved with her parents to Nsukka, Nigeria. A voracious reader from a young age, she found Things Fall Apart by novelist and fellow Igbo Chinua Achebe transformative.

Chimamanda Adichie Education Background

She completed her secondary education at the University’s school, where she excelled in academics and won a number of prizes. On completion of her schooling, she initially joined the University of Nigeria to study medicine and pharmacy.

Her writing skills came to light when she edited the university magazine called ‘Compass’. She left Nigeria at the age of 19 and went on to study communications and political science at Drexel University, Philadelphia, USA.

She subsequently got transferred to Eastern Connecticut State University to be closer to her sister and completed her bachelor’s degree with the distinction of summa cum laude in 2001. During her days in the university she wrote a number of articles in the university’s journal, ‘Campus Lantern’.

She furthered her academic career with a Master’s degree in Creative Writing from Johns Hopkins University in 2003 and Master of Arts degree in African Studies from Yale University in 2008.

During her studies at Yale University, she was a fellow at Princeton University for the academic year 2005-06. In 2008, she was conferred with the MacArthur Fellowship and in 2011-12 she was a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University.

Her academic achievements include an honorary doctorate in Humane Letters conferred upon her by Johns Hopkins University as well as Haverford College.

Chimamanda Adichie Books

In 1998 Adichie’s play For Love of Biafra was published in Nigeria. She later dismissed it as “an awfully melodramatic play,” but it was among the earliest works in which she explored the war in the late 1960s between Nigeria and its secessionist Biafra republic. She later wrote several short stories about that conflict, which would become the subject of her highly successful novel Half of a Yellow Sun (2006). As a student at Eastern Connecticut State University, she began writing her first novel, Purple Hibiscus (2003). Set in Nigeria, it is the coming-of-age story of Kambili, a 15-year-old whose family is wealthy and well respected but who is terrorized by her fanatically religious father. Purple Hibiscus garnered the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize in 2005 for Best First Book (Africa) and that year’s Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best First Book (overall). It was also short-listed for the 2004 Orange Prize (later called the Orange Broadband Prize and now the Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction).

Half of a Yellow Sun (2006; film 2013), Adichie’s second novel, was the result of four years of research and writing. It was built primarily on the experiences of her parents during the Nigeria-Biafra war. The result was an epic novel that vividly depicted the savagery of the war (which resulted in the displacement and deaths of perhaps a million people) but did so by focusing on a small group of characters, mostly middle-class Africans. Half of a Yellow Sun became an international best seller and was awarded the Orange Broadband Prize for Fiction in 2007. Eight years later it won the “Best of the Best” Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction, a special award for the “best” prizewinner from the previous decade.

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. Americanah (2013) centres on the romantic and existential struggles of a young Nigerian woman studying (and blogging about race) in the United States.

Adichie’s nonfiction included We Should All Be Feminists (2014), an essay adapted from a speech she gave at a TEDx talk in 2012; parts of the speech were also featured in Beyoncé’s song “Flawless” (2013). Dear Ijeawele, or A Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions was published in 2017. Following the death of her father, Adichie wrote Notes on Grief (2021), in which she mourned his passing and celebrated his life.

Chimamanda Adichie Parents

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie was born on 15 September 1977 in the city of Enugu in Nigeria into an Igbo family. She was brought up as the fifth sibling out of six children of her parents in the town of Nsukka. Her father, James Nwoye Adichie, was a professor of statistics in the University of Nigeria, located in Nsukka. Later he became the Deputy Vice Chancellor of the university. Her mother, Grace Ifeoma, was the first female registrar of the university

Chimamanda Adichie Awards & Achievements

Besides a number of listings, she has won numerous awards for her literary work. Just to mention a few, she won the ‘O Henry Prize’ for the short story ‘The American Embassy’ in 2003, the ‘Commonwealth Writers’ Prize : Best First Book’ for her novel ‘Purple Hibiscus’ in 2005, Reader’s Digest ‘Author of the Year’ in 2008 and the ‘National Book Critics Circle Award : Fiction Category’ for her book ‘Americanah’.

She has the distinction of having her books listed among the ‘Ten Best Books’ by New York Times and BBC. She has also been listed by the Time Magazine as one of the 100 Most Influential People in 2015.

Chimamanda Adichie Personal Life & Legacy

Adichie splits her time between her birthplace, Nigeria, and the USA, where she works. She is married to a Maryland based doctor and has a daughter. In order to give back to her country, she conducts writing workshops whenever she visits Nigeria.