Adichie was born in the city of Enugu in Nigeria, and grew up as the fifth of six children in an Igbo family in the university town of Nsukka in Enugu State. Her father, James Nwoye Adichie, worked as a professor of statistics at the University of Nigeria while her mother, Grace Ifeoma, was the university’s first female registrar.
The family lost almost everything during the Nigerian Civil War, including both maternal and paternal grandfathers. Her family’s ancestral village is in Abba in Anambra State.
In an interview published in the Financial Times in July 2016, Adichie revealed that she had a baby daughter. In a profile of Adichie, published in The New Yorker in June 2018, Larissa MacFarquhar wrote, “the man she ended up marrying in 2009 was almost comically suitable: a Nigerian doctor who practiced in America, whose father was a doctor and a friend of her parents.” Adichie is a Catholic and was raised Catholic as a child, though she considers her views, especially those on feminism, to sometimes conflict with her religion.
EDUCATION
Adichie completed her secondary education at the University of Nigeria Secondary School, Nsukka, where she received several academic prizes. She studied medicine and pharmacy at the University of Nigeria for a year and a half. During this period, she edited The Compass, a magazine run by the university’s Catholic medical students.
At the age of 19, Adichie left Nigeria for the United States to study communications and political science at Drexel University in Philadelphia.
She soon transferred to Eastern Connecticut State University. She received a bachelor’s degree from Eastern Connecticut State University, with the distinction of summa cum laude in 2001.
In 2003, she completed a master’s degree in creative writing at Johns Hopkins University. In 2008, she received a Master of Arts degree in African studies from Yale University.
RACE AND EXPERIENCE
While the novelist was growing up in Nigeria, she was not used to being identified by the colour of her skin, which only began to happen as soon as she arrived in the United States for college. As a black African in America, Adichie was suddenly confronted with what it meant to be a person of colour in the United States. Race as an idea became something that she had to navigate and learn.
She writes about this in hernovel Americanah.
Adichie was a Hodder fellow at Princeton University during the 2005–2006 academic year. In 2008, she was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship. She was also awarded a 2011–2012 fellowship by the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University. In 2016, she was conferred an honorary degree – Doctor of Humane letters, honoris causa, by Johns Hopkins University.
In 2017, she was conferred honorary degrees – Doctor of Humane letters, honoris causa, by Haverford College and The University of Edinburgh.
In 2018, she received an honorary degree, Doctor of Humane Letters, from Amherst College. She received an honorary degree, doctor honoris causa, from the Université de Fribourg, Switzerland, in 2019.
List of Books
In addition to several short stories and numerous essays, Chimamanda Ngozie Adichie has the following popular books to her credit:
- Dear Ijeawele, or A Feminist Manifesto In Fifteen Suggestions.
- We Should All Be Feminists.
- Americanah.
- The Thing Around Your Neck.
- Half of a Yellow Sun.
- Purple Hibiscus
