Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Adichie grew up on the campus of the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, where her father taught statistics and her mother was the university's registrar. She studied medicine briefly in Nigeria before moving to the United States, where she took degrees at Eastern Connecticut State University, Johns Hopkins and Yale.

Purple Hibiscus appeared in 2003 and won the Commonwealth Writers' Prize for best first book. Half of a Yellow Sun, set during the civil war, won the Orange Prize for Fiction in 2007 and was later filmed. The story collection The Thing Around Your Neck followed, then Americanah in 2013, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction. Her talks The Danger of a Single Story and We Should All Be Feminists have been viewed many millions of times, and the latter was published as a book-length essay. She received a MacArthur Fellowship in 2008 and runs a writing workshop in Lagos for younger Nigerian writers.

Adichie's work brought a large international readership to Nigerian fiction in the 2000s, and Half of a Yellow Sun in particular reopened public discussion of the civil war for readers born long after it. Her writing workshop has helped publish a number of younger Nigerian authors.