Doctor of Humane Letters

May 20, 2018

Fearless and forthright, Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie explores the complexities of love, race, gender, historical and cultural heritage, postcolonial identities, and diasporic dislocation in her beautifully crafted and widely acclaimed novels, short stories and nonfiction book-length essays. Her highly influential TED Talks, viewed by millions, have sealed her status as, in the words of writer Dave Eggers, “a defining voice on race and gender for the digital age.”

Adichie’s novels invite the reader to a lively, exacting, multifaceted and wide-ranging conversation. In her TED Talk “The Danger of a Single Story,” Adichie proposes that “when we realize that there is never a single story about any kind of place, we regain a kind of paradise.” Indeed, her stories and her style of telling them encourage the reader to reject simplicity about identity of any sort, and to perceive the equal humanity underlying seeming differences.

Adichie divides her time between Maryland and Lagos, Nigeria, where she leads the Farafina Trust Creative Writing Workshop, a program incubating a new generation of Nigerian writers.

Adichie’s first novel, Purple Hibiscus, was awarded the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best First Book (2005). Her second novel, Half of a Yellow Sun, set in Nigeria during and after the Biafran War, won the Orange Prize (2007). Her third novel, Americanah, a best-seller, won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction (2013). Her short stories have appeared in multiple publications, including a collection titled The Thing Around Your Neck (2009). She has authored two influential book-length essays on feminism, We Should All Be Feminists (2014) and Dear Ijeawele, or A Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions (2017).

Adiche has been a Hodder Fellow at Princeton University and a Radcliffe Institute Fellow at Harvard. She is the recipient of multiple honors, including a MacArthur Fellowship and the O. Henry Prize, and has recently been elected into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences as a Foreign Honorary Member. Adichie holds a B.A. from Eastern Connecticut State University and two master’s degrees, one in creative writing from Johns Hopkins University and another in African history from Yale.