Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie was born in 1977, in Enugu, Nigeria.

She was the fifth of six children in an Igbo family. The family lost everything during the Nigerian civil war.

She studied medicine and pharmacy at the University of Nigeria, then moved to the United States at the age of nineteen to study communications and political science at Eastern Connecticut State University.

While growing up in Nigeria, she was not used to being identified by the colour of her skin, which changed when she arrived in the United States. As a Black African in America, Adichie soon realised what it meant to be a person of colour in the United States. This realisation inspired Adichie, as the colour of people’s skin became something she had to learn about. She writes about this in her novel, Americanah.

Career

Her first piece of written poetry was for a play called For the Love of Biafra (1998). She then had several short stories published, which enabled her to win many competitions.

Her first novel, Purple Hibiscus, was published in 2003, and is set in Nigeria. It received the 2005 Commonwealth Writers Prize, and was shortlisted for the 2004 Orange Prize for Fiction.

Her second novel is Half of a Yellow Sun (2006), set before, and throughout, the Biafran War. It received the 2007 Orange Broadband Prize for Fiction.

Chimamanda spends her time between Nigeria, where she teaches writing workshops, and the United States.