Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Nigerian author

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie grew up in Nigeria, in the university town of Nsukka. She left to study in the United States at the age of 19, completing a BA at Eastern Connecticut State University and a Masters degree in Creative Writing at Johns Hopkins, Baltimore. In 2008, she gained an MA in African Studies from Yale University and continues to study there as a MacArthur Fellow. She published her first novel Purple Hibiscus in 2003, which won the Best First Book award in the 2005 Commonwealth Writers' Prize. Her second novel, Half of a Yellow Sun (2006) won the Orange Prize for Fiction in 2007 and in 2009 she published a collection of short stories entitled The Thing Around Your Neck.