Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie was born in Enugu, Nigeria, in 1977. She grew up on the campus of the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, where her father was a Professor and her mother was the first female Registrar. She studied medicine for a year at Nsukka and then left for the US at the age of 19 to continue her education on a different path. She has a Master’s Degree in Creative Writing from Johns Hopkins University and a Master of Arts degree in African History from Yale University. She was awarded a Hodder fellowship at Princeton University for the 2005-2006 academic year, and a fellowship at the Radcliffe Institute of Harvard University for the 2011-2012 academic year. In 2008, she received a MacArthur Fellowship.

Her first novel, "Purple Hibiscus," won the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, and her second novel, "Half of a Yellow Sun," won the Orange Prize. Her 2013 novel "Americanah" won the US National Book Critics Circle Award and was named one of The New York Times Top Ten Best Books of 2013. Her most recent book, "Dear Ijeawele, or A Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions," was published in March 2017.

She has delivered two landmark TED talks: her 2009 TED Talk, "The Danger of A Single Story" and her 2012 TEDx Euston talk, "We Should All Be Feminists", which started a worldwide conversation about feminism, and was published as a book in 2014. Additionally, was named one of TIME Magazine’s 100 Most Influential People in the World in 2015, and Fortune Magazine named her one of the World’s 50 Greatest Leaders in 2017.

Adichie divides her time between the United States and Nigeria, where she leads an annual creative writing workshop.