Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Half of a Yellow Sun is a novel by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and one of her most notable works. She received the Women's Prize for Fiction, an award that reflects the reach of her writing, as well as the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction and a MacArthur Fellowship. Her body of work spans fiction, non-fiction, and lectures, and Americanah and Purple Hibiscus are among her other well-known titles.
Adichie was born on September 15, 1977, in Enugu, Nigeria, and is a Nigerian citizen. She began her studies at the University of Nigeria before continuing her education in the United States, where she attended Drexel University, Eastern Connecticut State University, Johns Hopkins University, and Yale University. She works across several forms — she's a novelist, short story writer, poet, journalist, and non-fiction writer — and uses English, Igbo, and Nigerian Pidgin in her writing.
Her output, which includes fiction, non-fiction, and lectures, shows the range she brings to her work as a writer. The National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction and the MacArthur Fellowship together mark the recognition her writing has received from critics and institutions alike. Americanah remains one of the notable novels in her body of work, sitting alongside Half of a Yellow Sun and Purple Hibiscus as titles that have drawn sustained attention.
Quotes by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's insights on:
Because she said what she thought and because she smiled only when she felt like smiling, and not constantly and vacuously, America's cheapest caricature was cast on her, the angry black woman.
I was tired of everyone saying that when you write about race in America, it has to be nuanced, it has to be subtle, it has to be this and that.
Girls are socialised in ways that are harmful to their sense of self - to reduce themselves, to cater to the egos of men, to think of their bodies as repositories of shame. As adult women, many struggle to overcome, to unlearn, much of that social conditioning.
When I go back home now, when I go back to Nigeria now, I get off the plane in Lagos and I just don't think of race. I get on the plane and arrive in Atlanta, and immediately I'm aware of race.
I am a bit of a fundamentalist when it comes to black women's hair. Hair is hair - yet also about larger questions: self-acceptance, insecurity and what the world tells you is beautiful. For many black women, the idea of wearing their hair naturally is unbearable.
To return to the books of my childhood is to yield to the strain of nostalgia that is curious about the self I once was.
This idea of feminism as a party to which only a select few people get to come - this is why so many women, particularly women of colour, feel alienated from mainstream western academic feminism. Because don't we want it to be mainstream?
