Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Writer
She is one of Nigeria’s most famous English-language writers in the international publishing scene. At the age of eighteen, she went to study in the United States, where she continues to live after embarking on and continuing her literary career there.
After publishing poetry and a play, she made her debut as a novelist with Purple Hibiscus (Algonquin Books, 2003), which goes back to the years following the Nigerian Civil War, a period marked by the political instability resulting from several coups d’état. Her second novel, Half of a Yellow Sun (Penguin Random House, 2007), deals with a specific time in Nigeria’s history, namely the short existence of the Republic of Biafra and the subsequent civil war in which many Igbo people were massacred.
Although the legacy of colonialism in Nigeria has been the backdrop to her first two novels, she has progressively expanded her geographic scope to reflect on the experience of racism in the West, as portrayed in her novel Americanah (Penguin Random House, 2014), in which she describes the lives of Nigerians living in other parts of the world.
Moreover, Chimamanda Ngozie Adichie is a well-known commentator in present-day feminism and her two essays on the subject are bestsellers: We Should All be Feminists (Penguin Random House, 2015), and Dear Ijeawele, or A Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions (Penguin Random House, 2017).
Update: 24 July 2017