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Written by Anika Jena
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is a Nigerian American author, speaker, and feminist. She was born in Enugu, Nigeria in 1977. She was surrounded by scholars and pioneers during her childhood years. Her father, James Nwoye Adichie, was a professor at the University of Nigeria at Nsukka, a city where she grew up. Her mother, Grace Ifeoma, was the University’s first woman registrar. Adichie loved to read and took a special interest in novels written by Igbo authors like Chinua Achebe, who wrote Things Fall Apart. Adichie initially chose to pursue medicine and pharmacy at the University.
During her time at the University of Nigeria, Adichie edited The Compass, a med school magazine. However, when she reached the age of nineteen, she decided to make writing and communications as her full-time academic focus. She moved to Pennsylvania, where she studied communications at Drexel University, and then to Connecticut, where she wrote articles for the Campus Lantern as well as earned her degree in communications and political science in 2001. She went on to get her Master’s degrees at Johns Hopkins and Yale University while splitting her time between the United States and Nigeria. In 2003, Adichie wrote her debut novel, Purple Hibiscus, about a young Nigerian girl whose dreams were weighed down by her fanatically religious father.
During her university years, Adichie wrote her first stories and plays about a Nigerian war that occurred in the 1960s. Her parents’ stories about this war served as the baseline for her wildly successful 2006 novel, Half of a Yellow Sun, which was an international bestseller and won the “Best of the Best” Baileys Prize for fiction. Her more recent works include Americanah, which centers on a Nigerian woman’s discovery of racial prejudice in America, and We Should All Be Feminists, a nonfiction literary study on gender equality. Her novels have been translated into more than thirty different languages.
Adichie’s essay, We Should All Be Feminists, is an adaptation of a TED Talk she gave in 2012. Just a year later, she discussed the danger of miscommunication in her second TED Talk, The Danger of a Single Story. In 2017, Adichie published A Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions. Originally a collection of Facebook musings addressed to a close friend, the book discusses tips to raise a strong, happy daughter. She asserts:
Teach her that the idea of ‘gender roles’ is absolute nonsense. Do not ever tell her that she should or should not do something because she is a girl. ‘Because you are a girl’ is never a reason for anything. Ever.
About the Writer
Anika is a senior at Dougherty Valley High. She is an avid pianist and dancer, and enjoys reading and running in her spare time. You can find her on Instagram @anika.jena!
References
“Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.” Encyclopædia Britannica, Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc., www.britannica.com/biography/Chimamanda-Ngozi-Adichie.
“About Chimamanda: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie: Official Author Website.” Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, 15 June 2021, www.chimamanda.com/about-chimamanda/.
“The Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie Website Biography.” The Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie Website, www.cerep.ulg.ac.be/adichie/cnabio.html.