Nigeria, the fifth ofsix children to Igbo parents, Grace Ifeoma and
James Nwoye Adichie.
While the family's ancestral hometown is Abba in Anambra State,
Chimamanda grew up in Nsukka, in the house formerly occupied by
Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe. Chimamanda's father, who is now
retired, worked at the University of Nigeria, located in Nsukka. He
was Nigeria's first professor of statistics, and later became Deputy
Vice-Chancellor of the University.
Her mother was the first female registrar at the same institution.
Chimamanda completed her secondary education at the University's
school, receiving several academic prizes.
She went on to study medicine and pharmacy at the University of
Nigeria for a year and a half. During this period, she edited The
Compass, a magazine run by the University's Catholic medical students.
At the age of nineteen, Chimamanda left for the United States. She
gained a scholarship to study communication at Drexel University in
Philadelphia for two years, and she went on to pursue a degree in
communication and political science at Eastern Connecticut State
University.
While in Connecticut, she stayed with her sister Ijeoma, who runs a
medical practice close to the university.
Chimamanda graduated summa cum laude from Eastern in 2001, and then
completed a master's degree in creative writing at Johns Hopkins
University, Baltimore.
It is during her senior year at Eastern that shestarted working on her
first novel, Purple Hibiscus , which was released in October 2003.
The book has received wide critical acclaim: it was shortlisted for
the Orange Fiction Prize (2004) and was awarded the Commonwealth
Writers' Prize for Best First Book (2005).
Her second novel, Half of a Yellow Sun (also the title of one of her
short stories), is set before and during the Biafran War. It was
published in August 2006 in the United Kingdom and in September 2006
in the United States. Like Purple Hibiscus, it has also been released
in Nigeria.
Chimamanda was a Hodder fellow at Princeton University during the
2005-2006 academic year, and earned an MA in African Studies from Yale
University in 2008.
Her collection of short stories, The Thing around Your Neck , was
published in 2009 . Chimamanda says her next major literary project
will focus on the Nigerian immigrant experience in the United States.
Chimamanda is now married and divides her time between Nigeria, where
she regularly teaches writing workshops, and the United States. She
has recently been awarded a 2011-2012 fellowship by the Radcliffe
Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University.
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