Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (1977– ) was raised in an Igbo family in Enugu, south-eastern Nigeria. Her parents and grandparents had been significantly affected by the civil war between 1967 and 1970; both her grandfathers died as a consequence. As a young adult, Adichie began studying medicine at the University of Nigeria, where both her parents worked, before relocating to the US to read for degrees at Drexel University, Philadelphia and Connecticut State University. She was awarded master’s degrees from John Hopkins University in 2003 and Yale in 2008. It was during these years that she was forced to confront the realities of race and racism in contemporary America. She has since stated that, for her, ‘race is such a strange construct because you have to learn what it means to be Black in America’, particularly as she was not taught the transatlantic slave trade in Nigerian schools. She subsequently navigated what it meant to be Black and African, but not African-American, in the twenty-first century US. These combined experiences influenced the writing of Adichie’s third novel, Americanah (2013), which follows the protagonist, Ifemelu, as she...