1.2: Education and Career

Educational History

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie has received numerous prestigious degrees, fellowships, and honorary degrees over the course of her career. She began her education at the University of Nigeria, where she studied medicine and pharmacy (Tunca). While she was a student there, she edited The Compass, a magazine run by the University’s Catholic medical students. At age 19 she attended Drexel University in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania to study communication. Adichie then went on to study communication and political science at Eastern Connecticut State University. During her time at Eastern Connecticut, she wrote for the campus journal. She graduated from Eastern Connecticut in 2001, earning her bachelor’s with summa cum laude honors. After receiving her bachelor’s, Adichie went on to receive her master’s in creative writing from John Hopkins University in 2003. From 2005-2006, Adichie was a Hodder Fellow at Princeton University. The fellowship is awarded to artists, humanists, and writers “of exceptional promise to pursue independent projects during the academic year” (Princeton). In 2008, she received her Master of Arts in African Studies from Yale University (Tunca). Additionally, in 2008 she was awarded the MacArthur Fellowship. This prestigious fellowship awards the recipient with $625,000 to pursue their “creative inclinations” (MacArthur Foundation). She was also awarded the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study Fellowship from Harvard University in 2011, a fellowship that provides the recipient the opportunity to work on an individual project, such as a novel, while “mining and deepening the knowledge, ingenuity, and talent of the Harvard University Community” (Radcliffe Harvard). This fellowship allowed her to research for and work on her third novel, Americanah.

Adichie has received an extensive list of honorary degrees and doctorates from colleges and universities all over the world. In 2015 she received an honorary doctorate from Eastern Connecticut State University. In 2016, she was honored with the Barnard Medal of Distinction. Also in 2016, she received an honorary doctorate from Johns Hopkins University. In 2017 she was elected as a Foreign Honorary Member into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, as well as a recipient of an honorary degree from Haverford College and an Honorary Degree of Doctor of Letters from the University of Edinburgh in Scotland. In 2018, Adichie was the recipient of many honorary degrees, including an Honorary Doctors of Humane Letters from Duke University, an Honorary Doctor of Humane Letters from Amherst College, an Honorary Doctor of Letters from Bowdoin College, and an Honorary Doctor of Literature degree from the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London. In 2019, Adichie received honorary degrees from American University in Washington DC, Georgetown University, the Rhode Island School of Design, Yale University, and Northwestern University. The most recent honorary degree she was awarded was from the University of Pennsylvania in May of 2020.

Publication History

Adichie’s first published work was a collection of poetry titled Decisions, which was published in 1997 when she was just 21 and still an undergraduate student. The following year she published a play, For the Love of Biafra, exploring the life of an Igbo woman during the Nigerian Civil War when the region of eastern Nigeria attempted to gain independence as the nation of Biafran. In 2002, Adichie started gaining the reading public’s attention with her short stories “You in America'' and “Harmattan Morning,” the latter of which won the BBC short story award. Adichie published her critically acclaimed first novel, Purple Hibiscus, which explored the political turmoil of Nigeria in the late 1990s through the eyes of 15-year-old Kambili Achike, in 2003. Three years later, in 2006, Adichie published her second novel, Half of a Yellow Sun, which upon release once again gained critical and literary acclaim. In Half of a Yellow Sun Adichie returned to writing about the Nigerian Civil War and Biafra, this time using the perspectives of three different characters to tell the story of life both before and during the war.

In 2009, Adichie published The Thing Around Your Neck, a collection of short stories which features a mix of new and previously published works. Most of this collection is set either in Nigeria or the United States, and most of the stories feature female protagonists navigating issues related to gender, cultural displacement, or familial trauma. This same year Adichie gave her first TED Talk, “The Danger of a Single Story,” which allowed both Adichie and her work to reach a wider audience. In 2011 Adichie published the short story “Ceiling,” and the following year she gave her second TED Talk, “We Should All Be Feminists,” which she adapted for publication in 2014. In 2013 she published her highly anticipated third novel, Americanah, which follows the character Ifemelu as she navigates returning to Nigeria after spending thirteen years in the United States. In 2017 Adichie published Dear Ijeawele, or a Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions, which offers readers a collection of guidelines for raising children in a feminist manner. In 2020, Adichie published the short story “Zikora,” in which the protagonist unexpectedly finds herself a single mother, and a New Yorker essay, “Notes on Grief,” in which Adichie writes about losing her father in the summer of 2020, in the middle of the COVID19 pandemic. On May 11, 2021, “Notes on Grief” was published and expanded into a book format similar to that of We Should All be Feminists and Dear Ijeawele.

Award History

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie has been both nominated and won many awards throughout her career. Her first award was the BBC Measuring Competition for her work “The Harmattan Morning,” which she won in 2002. She was also awarded the David T. Wong International Short Story Prize (PEN American Center Award) for her short story titled, “Half of a Yellow Sun.” Her first novel, Purple Hibiscus, won the Commonwealth Writers prize for first best book (Africa and Overall). She also won the Hurston Wright Legacy award. Her first novel was shortlisted for The Orange Prize, the John Llewellyn prize, and the Booker prize. Her second novel, also titled Half of a Yellow Sun, won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award: Fiction Category, the PEW Beyond Margins award, and the Orange Broadband prize: Fiction Category in 2007.

In 2008 she won the Reader's Digest Author of the Year award, as well as the Future Award, Nigeria: Young Person of the year award. For her novel Americanah, released in 2013 she won the Chicago Tribune Heartland Prize: Fiction Category as well as the National Book Critics Circle Award: Fiction Category. She won the “Best of the Best” of the second decade of the Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction (formerly the Orange Prize for Fiction) in 2015 for Half of a Yellow Sun. Also in 2015, the French translation of Dear Ijeawele, or A Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions (Chère Ijeawele, ou un manifeste pour une éducation féministe) won 'Le Grand Prix de l'héroïne Madame Figaro' 2017. In 2018 she won the Barnes and Noble Writers for Writer award, and the PEN Pinter Prize. Global Hope Coalition's Thought Leadership Award was given to her in 2018 as well. In 2020, she won the Women's Prize for Fiction “Winner of Winners” (25 years) for “Half of a Yellow Sun” and Woman of the Decade by This Day Nigeria. She was also awarded the Africa Freedom Prize 2020 by the Friedrich Naumann Foundation for Freedom on December 14, 2020.

Among her numerous accomplishments and awards, she has earned a list of other distinctions. She was listed in The New Yorker’s “20 Under 40” in 2010, at the beginning of her career. She was also among the “100 Most Influential Africans 2013” in New African, the “Leading Women of 2014” by CNN, and the “100 Most Influential People 2015” in Time Magazine. She was included in Vanity Fair's “International Best Dressed” in 2016. Adichie was featured on PBS's “The Great American Read” and in Barack Obama's 2018 recommended summer reading list for Americanah in 2018. In 2018 Americanah was also listed among the “15 remarkable books by women that are shaping the way we read and write fiction in the 21st century” in The New York Times. Adichie was included in the “100 Novels That Shaped Our World” by the BBC, for Half of a Yellow Sun in 2019, as well as listed as one of the “World's Most Inspiring People” by OOOM Magazine. Notably, she was recognized as among the “20 Women Who Will Shape Events in Nigeria in 2020” by ThisDay in 2020.