I’m Honored To Receive An Award At The New York Public Library’s Gala – Chimamanda Adichie

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Tina Brown, Jonathan Lethem, and Darren Walker have been honored as Library Lions at the New York Public Library’s annual gala.

Adichie has now jumped on Instagram to share photos and speak about the event, and Nigerians have been reacting.

According to her, to be honored as a Library Lion is utterly spirit-lifting and she is very grateful for the award.

See photos,

Congrats to her.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is a Nigerian writer whose works range from novels to short stories to nonfiction. She was described in The Times Literary Supplement as “the most prominent” of a “procession of critically acclaimed young anglophone authors [who] is succeeding in attracting a new generation of readers to African literature”.

Adichie has written the novels Purple Hibiscus (2003), Half of a Yellow Sun (2006), and Americanah (2013), the short story collection The Thing Around Your Neck (2009), and the book-length essay We Should All Be Feminists (2014). Her most recent book, Dear Ijeawele, or A Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions, was published in March 2017. In 2008, she was awarded a MacArthur Genius Grant.

Adichie was born in the city of Enugu in Nigeria, and grew up as the fifth of six children in an Igbo family in the university town of Nsukka in Enugu State. While she was growing up, her father James Nwoye Adichie was a professor of statistics at the University of Nigeria. Her mother Grace Ifeoma was the university’s first female registrar. The family lost almost everything during the Nigerian Civil War, including both maternal and paternal grandfathers. Her family’s ancestral village is in Abba in Anambra State.

In 2003, she completed a master’s degree in creative writing at Johns Hopkins University. In 2008, she received a Master of Arts degree in African studies from Yale University.