Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie Birth:
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie was born September 15, 1977 in Enugu, Nigeria.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie Background and Writing:
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie grew up in Nsukka, a university town in southeastern Nigeria, where her family lived in the house formerly owned by fellow Nigerian writer, Chinua Achebe. Her father was a statistics professor and her mother a registrar at the university.
At 19, she moved to the United States and study ommunications and political science at both Drexel University and Eastern Connecticut State. Adichie graduated in 2001 and in 2003 received her master's degree in creative writing from Johns Hopkins University. She went on to pursue a second master's degree, this time in African Studies, from Yale, which she completed in 2008.
Adichie's first novel, Purple Hibiscus (2003) won the Commonwealth Writers' Prize for Best First Book and her second novel, Half of a Yellow Sun (2006), an historical fiction that is set during the Nigerian-Biafran War and tells the story of two sisters, won the 2007 Orange Prize.
Her third book is a collection of short stories published in 2009 called The Thing Around Your Neck. It was shortlisted for the 2009 John Llewellyn-Rhys Memorial Prize and the 2010 Commonwealth Writers Prize.
Her third book is a collection of short stories published in 2009 called The Thing Around Your Neck. It was shortlisted for the 2009 John Llewellyn-Rhys Memorial Prize and the 2010 Commonwealth Writers Prize.
Adichie was selected in 2010 as one of The New Yorker's "20 Under 40" writers. She is married and lives both in Nigeria, where she teaches writing workshops, and the United States.
