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Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie was born in Enugu State South East Nigeria in 1977. She is from Abba, in Anambra State, but grew up in the university town of Nsukka where Adichie grew up in the Nigerian university town of Nsukka, one of six siblings in a middle-class family. Both her parents (who are still alive) worked at the university - her father as a mathematics professor, her mother as an administrator. The family lived, by sheer coincidence, in a former home of Chinua Achebe, Nigeria's most famous novelist. But, Adichie says, they weren't especially bookish, and she says that her early interest in literature set her apart from her siblings, and made her decision to become a writer more acceptable to her parents.

Adichie attended primary and secondary schools and briefly studied Medicine and Pharmacy. She then moved to the United States to attend college, graduating summa cum laude from Eastern Connecticut State with a major in Communication and a minor in Political Science. She holds a Masters degree in Creative Writing from Johns Hopkins and a Masters degree in African Studies from Yale.

Purple Hibiscus won the Commonwealth Writers' Prize and the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award. It was also short-listed for the Orange Prize and the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize and long-listed for the Booker Prize. Her short fiction has appeared in Granta, Prospect, and The Iowa Review among other literary journals, and she received an O. Henry Prize in 2003. She was a 2005-2006 Hodder Fellow at Princeton, where she taught Introductory Fiction. She divides her time between the United States and Nigeria.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Achievements

2001 Received a BA in communication and political science at Eastern Connecticut State University.

2003 Her first novel, Purple Hibiscis, garnered widespread critical acclaim. Completed a creative writing MA at Johns Hopkins university, Baltimore.

2007 Half of a Yellow Sun, set during the Biafran war, won the Orange Prize.

2008 Graduated with an MA in African Studies from Yale University.