Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is a Nigerian author whose novels and essays on race, gender, and identity have made her one of the most important literary voices of her generation.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie grew up in Nigeria as the daughter of academics and began writing early, publishing her debut novel as a young woman. She has since established herself as one of the defining literary voices writing in English today. Half of a Yellow Sun, her second novel, is set during the Biafran War of the 1960s and follows several characters across the conflict with extraordinary empathy and precision. It is a war novel that refuses to reduce its characters to symbols, and its emotional honesty won it the Orange Prize for Fiction in 2007. The novel remains her most formally accomplished work.

Americanah, her third novel, shifts register — it is contemporary, satirical, and frankly comic as well as serious, following a Nigerian woman who moves to the United States and a Nigerian man who ends up in England. The novel’s observations about race in America — particularly in its blog passages narrated by the protagonist — are sharp and have generated significant discussion. Some readers find the novel’s scope slightly unwieldy in its final third; others consider it her masterpiece. We Should All Be Feminists, adapted from her TED talk, is a brief, pointed argument for feminism that reached a global audience after being sampled in a Beyoncé song and distributed to schoolchildren in Sweden.

Adichie’s writing is distinguished by its intelligence, its formal range, and its refusal to offer comfortable conclusions. She writes about Nigeria and the Nigerian diaspora with both critical distance and deep love, and her voice — precise, assured, often wry — is immediately recognizable.