Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie was born on 15 September 1977 in Enugu, Nigeria, and grew up in Nsukka, in the same university house that had once belonged to Chinua Achebe's family, an early proximity to Nigeria's literary tradition that she has cited as personally significant. She initially studied medicine and pharmacy at the University of Nigeria before moving to the United States at 19 to study communication and political science, later earning a master's degree in creative writing from Johns Hopkins University.

Adichie's 2003 debut novel, Purple Hibiscus, examining a repressive Nigerian household under a dictatorship-era backdrop, received significant critical acclaim, but it was her 2006 second novel, Half of a Yellow Sun, set during the Nigerian Civil War and Biafran secession, that established her as a major international literary figure, winning the Orange Prize for Fiction and drawing comparisons to Achebe's own literary examination of Nigerian history and identity.

Adichie's 2013 novel Americanah, examining race, immigration and identity through a Nigerian woman's experience moving between Nigeria, the United States and the United Kingdom, became a significant bestseller and further cemented her reputation as one of the most important contemporary voices writing on both African and diaspora experience. Her 2012 TED talk "We Should All Be Feminists" reached a global audience after being sampled by Beyoncé in the song "***Flawless" and later published as a standalone book distributed to Swedish sixteen-year-olds as part of a gender-equality curriculum.