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Its Wednesday great minds and we are crushing on another phenomenal woman whose journey togreatness started at age 10 when she read the book of Late Prof. Chinua Achebe titled Things Fall Apart.
As a little girl, she was inspired when she saw her life being represented on the pages of the book and this enhance her interesting in writing
Our Crush is a phenomenal woman who has gone wide and far with her beliefs, she is a renowned novelist, non-fiction writer, short-story writer, actress, human activist and feminist, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, who has spent years speaking about feminism, inspiring activists for gender equality all over the world, is representing Nigeria and Africa in the Diaspora
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, born on September 15, 1977 in Enugu, Nigeria, was raised in Nsukka near the University of Nigeria. Her father, James Nwoye Adichie, was the first professor of statistics in Nigeria and later became the Deputy Vice-Chancellor of the University of Nigeria, Nsukka. Her mother, Ifeoma Aidichie, became the First Female Registrar at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka. Adichie is the fifth child of a family of six children. She is of Igbo descent and her ancestral home is in Abba.
Although Adichie enrolled in medical school for the benefit of her father, she later dropped out to pursue her dream of becoming a writer. When she was 19, she left Nigeria on a scholarship to Drexel University in Philadelphia. She studied communication at Drexel and earned a degree in Communication and Political science at Eastern Connecticut State University. She graduated summa cum laude in 2001 and in 2003; she received her master’s degree in Creative Writing at Johns Hopkins University. Later 2008, she received her master’s degree in African Studies from Yale University
Her work has been translated into over thirty languages and has appeared in various publications, including The New Yorker, Granta, The O. Henry Prize Stories, the Financial Times, and Zoetrope. She is the author of the novels Purple Hibiscus, which won the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize and the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award; Half of a Yellow Sun, which won the Orange Prize and was a National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist and a New York Times Notable Book; and Americanah, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award and was named one of The New York Times Top Ten Best Books of 2013. Adichie is also the author of the story collection The Thing Around Your Neck.
Adichie has been invited to speak around the world. Her 2009 TED Talk, The Danger of A Single Story, is now one of the most-viewed TED Talks of all time. Her 2012 talk We Should All Be Feminists has a started a worldwide conversation about feminism, and was published as a book in 2014. Her most recent book, Dear Ijeawele, or a Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions, was published in March 2017. A recipient of a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, Adichie divides her time between the United States and Nigeria, especially Lagos. She was recently awarded an Honorary degree at Duke University and is set to receive another academic award from the SOAS University of London.
Adichie, who prefers to be addressed as Miss, is married to Dr. Ivara Esegee, a mixed-race medical doctor who is currently working at Baltimore, Maryland in the United States of America. They are blessed with a daughter that arrived in 2015.
A woman genuinely interested in the girl-child and treatment of women, Adichie is a staunch feminist that has used her works to penetrate the misogyny and condescension she has faced as an African woman in the global literary community. She also tries to combat the image of Africans as portrayed by Western media, choosing to write first from her experience. Adichie is an affluent and educated Nigerian and for this, she has been criticized for shying away from the “real” Africa, writing about characters who are not “starving, or begin bullied. But this hasn’t stopped her is constantly addressed as a sensational writer.
