Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is a Nigerian American writer, activist, and feminist. She was born September 15, 1977 in Enugu, Nigeria (Luebering). Adichie is the fifth of six children born to a middle-class Igbo family (Tuncan). Adichie’s parents, James Nwoye Adichie and Grace Ifeoma, both made strides working in higher education.

Early Life

Adichie grew up in Nsukka, in the house formerly belonging to the renowned Nigerian author, Chinua Achebe. Although Adichie grew up in flourishing conditions, her family history was detrimentally impacted by the Nigerian civil war, also known as the Biafran war of 1966-1970. Born seven years later, Adichie lived in the “shadow” of the conflict. Adichie’s immediate family suffered as a result of the war, with both her grandfathers perishing in refugee camps as Igbo Nigerians. This facet of Adichie’s heritage would later influence her writings.

Growing up, Adichie avidly enjoyed reading and began writing at the age of seven. In her adulthood, she realized that her characters did not actually reflect her own identity or cultural experiences. This disconnect stemmed from British and American writings shaping her literary worldview.

In her TED Talk, “The Danger of a Single Story,” Adichie reflects on how her “characters were white and blue-eyed, they played in the snow, they ate apples…[and her] characters also drank a lot of ginger beer, because the characters in the British books [she] read drank ginger beer. Never mind that [she] had no idea what ginger beer was.” Adichie was finally able to see herself in literature when she discovered African writers like Chinua Achebe and Camara Laye. This familiarity helped Adichie form her own craft in writing.

Watch Adichie’s TedTalk, “The Danger of a Single Story”:

Present Day

Today, Adichie splits her time between living in Nigeria and the United States. She is married to Ivara Esege, whom she wed in 2009. Much like his wife, Esege was born and raised in Nigeria. Adichie and Esege have one daughter, who was born in 2016.

James Nwoye Adichie passed away suddenly from kidney failure at the age of 88 in June of 2020 (Corrigan). Adichie writes about his passing in her 2020 essay, “Notes on Grief.” This poetic essay highlights her father’s life. Additionally, Adichie details the heart wrenching experience of losing a loved one during the Covid-19 lockdown with family members scattered across the globe. Less than a year after her father’s passing, Adichie received news of her mother, Grace Ifeoma’s unexpected death. “How does a heart break twice?” Adichie rhetorically asked in an online post regarding her mother’s death (qtd. in Corrigan).

Educational History

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie has received numerous prestigious degrees, fellowships, and honorary degrees over the course of her career. She began her education at the University of Nigeria, where she studied medicine and pharmacy (Tunca). While she was a student there, she edited The Compass, a magazine run by the University’s Catholic medical students.

At age 19, she attended Drexel University in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania to study communication. Adichie then went on to study communication and political science at Eastern Connecticut State University. She graduated from Eastern Connecticut in 2001, earning her bachelor’s with summa cum laude honors.

Adichie went on to receive her master’s in creative writing from John Hopkins University in 2003. From 2005-2006, Adichie was a Hodder Fellow at Princeton University. The fellowship is awarded to artists, humanists, and writers “of exceptional promise to pursue independent projects during the academic year” (Princeton).

In 2008, she received her Master of Arts in African Studies from Yale University (Tunca). Additionally, in 2008 she was awarded the MacArthur Fellowship.  She was also awarded the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study Fellowship from Harvard University in 2011. This fellowship allowed her to research for and work on her third novel, Americanah.

Publication History

Adichie’s first published work was a collection of poetry titled Decisions, which was published in 1997 when she was just 21 and still an undergraduate student. The following year she published a play, For the Love of Biafra, exploring the life of an Igbo woman during the Nigerian Civil War when the region of eastern Nigeria attempted to gain independence as the nation of Biafran.

In 2002, Adichie started gaining the reading public’s attention with her short stories “You in America” and “Harmattan Morning,” the latter of which won the BBC short story award. Adichie published her critically acclaimed first novel, Purple Hibiscus, which explored the political turmoil of Nigeria in the late 1990s through the eyes of 15-year-old Kambili Achike, in 2003.

Three years later, in 2006, Adichie published her second novel, Half of a Yellow Sun. Adichie returned to writing about the Nigerian Civil War and Biafra, this time using the perspectives of three different characters to tell the story of life both before and during the war.

In 2009, Adichie published The Thing Around Your Neck, a collection of short stories which features a mix of new and previously published works. Most of this collection is set either in Nigeria or the United States, and most of the stories feature female protagonists navigating issues related to gender, cultural displacement, or familial trauma.

This same year Adichie gave her first TED Talk, “The Danger of a Single Story,” which allowed both Adichie and her work to reach a wider audience. In 2011 Adichie published the short story “Ceiling,” and the following year she gave her second TED Talk, “We Should All Be Feminists,” which she adapted for publication in 2014.

In 2013, she published her third novel, Americanah, which follows the character Ifemelu as she navigates returning to Nigeria after spending thirteen years in the United States. In 2017, Adichie published Dear Ijeawele, or a Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions, which offers readers a collection of guidelines for raising children in a feminist manner.

In 2020, Adichie published the short story “Zikora,” in which the protagonist unexpectedly finds herself a single mother, and a New Yorker essay, “Notes on Grief,” in which Adichie writes about losing her father in the summer of 2020, in the middle of the COVID19 pandemic. On May 11, 2021, “Notes on Grief” was published and expanded into a book format similar to that of We Should All be Feminists and Dear Ijeawele.

Award History

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie has been both nominated and won many awards throughout her career. Her first award was the BBC Measuring Competition for her work “The Harmattan Morning,” which she won in 2002. She was also awarded the David T. Wong International Short Story Prize (PEN American Center Award) for her short story titled, “Half of a Yellow Sun.”

Her first novel, Purple Hibiscus, won the Commonwealth Writers prize for Best First Book (Africa and Overall). She also won the Hurston Wright Legacy award. Her first novel was shortlisted for The Orange Prize, the John Llewellyn prize, and the Booker prize. Her second novel, also titled Half of a Yellow Sun, won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award: Fiction Category, the PEW Beyond Margins award, and the Orange Broadband prize: Fiction Category in 2007.

In 2008, she won the Reader’s Digest Author of the Year award, as well as the Future Award, Nigeria: Young Person of the year award. For her novel Americanah,  she won the Chicago Tribune Heartland Prize: Fiction Category as well as the National Book Critics Circle Award: Fiction Category. She won the “Best of the Best” of the second decade of the Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction (formerly the Orange Prize for Fiction) in 2015 for Half of a Yellow Sun.

In 2018, she won the Barnes and Noble Writers for Writers award, the PEN Pinter Prize, and Global Hope Coalition’s Thought Leadership Award. In 2020, she won the Women’s Prize for Fiction “Winner of Winners” (25 years) for Half of a Yellow Sun and Woman of the Decade by This Day Nigeria. She was also awarded the Africa Freedom Prize 2020 by the Friedrich Naumann Foundation for Freedom on December 14, 2020.

Among her numerous accomplishments and awards, she has earned a list of other distinctions. She was listed in The New Yorker’s “20 Under 40” in 2010, at the beginning of her career. She was also among the “100 Most Influential Africans 2013” in New African, the “Leading Women of 2014” by CNN, and the “100 Most Influential People 2015” in Time Magazine. She was included in Vanity Fair’s “International Best Dressed” in 2016.

Adichie was featured on PBS’s “The Great American Read” and in Barack Obama’s 2018 recommended summer reading list for Americanah in 2018. In 2018, Americanah was also listed among the “15 remarkable books by women that are shaping the way we read and write fiction in the 21st century” in The New York Times. Adichie was included in the “100 Novels That Shaped Our World” by the BBC, for Half of a Yellow Sun in 2019, as well as listed as one of the “World’s Most Inspiring People” by OOOM Magazine. Notably, she was recognized as among the “20 Women Who Will Shape Events in Nigeria in 2020” by ThisDay in 2020.

Social Media Presence

Adichie’s lectures are distributed widely across her various social media platforms, reaching an expansive audience. Through social media, Adichie not only promotes her own literary work, but she promotes the works of writers who reflect her passion for knowledge and the pursuit of truth. Most of her posts involve topics such as feminism, women’s empowerment, feminist literature, and other forms of activism. Adichie uses social media to promote excellence in all of these areas.

Adichie has a vast and active following on social media. She uses social media accounts on all major platforms, including X, Facebook, Instagram, and an official author’s website. She established her Facebook presence on September 28, 2008 and then created her Instagram account nine years later.  Adichie is most active on Instagram where she posts regularly.   She uses social media to promote an interest in literature, especially Nigerian literature and culture. In this vein, Adichie is promoting her own work while also creating an informed community of followers and cultivating within them a desire to read.  Overall, Adichie’s Instagram posts blend personal tidbits with global social justice activism. Adichie uses her social media to promote her work and directly address social issues surrounding women’s empowerment, gender inequality, European beauty standards, misrepresentation of Africa, and other racial issues arising in the world.

Adichie’s Feminism

Adichie is an outspoken activist who focuses on race, feminism, and politics. She defines feminism as believing in the social, political, and economic equality of the sexes. Adichie sees gender as a social construct. She also notes that it’s important not to mistake women’s rights for “human rights” because to do so would mean ignoring the systematic oppression women have faced. Feminism focuses on women because women are often mistreated by society. When Adichie accepted the PEN Pinter prize in 2018 she stated the following:

[M]y writing gave me a platform to speak about issues that I have always cared about. I do not want to use my art as an armour of neutrality behind which to hide. I am a writer and I am a citizen, and I see my speaking out on social issues as a responsibility of citizenship. I am struck by how often this speaking out is met, in Nigeria, not with genuine engagement, whether to agree or disagree, but with a desire to silence me. A journalist once helpfully summed it up for me: people don’t like it when you talk about feminism, they just want you to shut up and write.

Adichie is not afraid to use her influential position to promote change in the world, focusing her attention particularly on women’s issues in both Nigeria and the United States (YaleNews).

Adichie uses her works of fiction and nonfiction literature to portray and represent women in both Nigeria and the United States and to challenge the stereotypes people have of feminists. She uses her power as a writer to educate people on what it means to be a feminist. In an interview with Trevor Noah in 2018, Adichie states, “People think a feminist is a crazy woman, who hates men and doesn’t shave” (The Daily Show). Adichie aims to educate the world on feminism and clear the taboo of being a feminist. Adichie stresses the importance of, “teaching boys and young men to feel comfortable around women who are powerful, who make more money, are more talented or even more vocal” (Rajitha). In a sense, Adichie is expressing that feminism goes both ways. Girls should be raised to be empowered while boys should be raised to support women who are more powerful than them. Adichie uses her platform to also speak about the perspective of feminism from different cultures and how Western feminism does not resonate with everyone; in this way, she brings awareness to the intersections of culture and feminism.

In Beyonce’s 2013 hit song “Flawless” she sampled a part of Adichie’s acclaimed TEDx talk, We Should All Be Feminists.