Apollo

Born in Enugu, Nigeria, on September 15, 1977, Adichie was the fifth of six children born to James Nwoye Adichie and Grace Ifeoma, who both worked at the University of Nigeria in Nsukka. Adichie often draws on her own experiences in her work, and in “Apollo,” Okenwa grows up in similar circumstances: He is an upper-middle-class boy living in Adichie’s own hometown of Enugu with two university professors for parents. Adichie’s family lived in a house on campus that once belonged to the celebrated Nigerian author Chinua Achebe, whose novel Things Fall Apart (1958) tremendously impacted Adichie when she read it at 10 years old. Before then, she hadn’t realized that literature could be about people like her or topics that were relevant to her life. After discovering Achebe and other African authors, she “realized that people like [her], girls with skin the color of chocolate, whose kinky hair could not form ponytails, could also exist in literature” (Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi. “The Danger of a Single Story.” TED.com, TEDGlobal, 2009).

After briefly studying medicine and pharmacy at the University of Nigeria, the 19-year-old Adichie moved to America to study communications and political science at Drexel University in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, before transferring to Eastern State Connecticut University. She earned a master’s degree in creative writing from Johns Hopkins University (2003) and another master’s degree from Yale (2008) and has received several fellowships to schools such as Princeton and Harvard. She currently holds 16 honorary doctorates from a number of prestigious universities. Her first book of poems, Decisions, was published in 1997 when she was 20 years old.

Since then, Adichie has written a number of critically acclaimed novels and short stories. Her first novel, Purple Hibiscus (2003), a coming-of-age story about a young Nigerian girl with an abusive fundamentalist father, won the Orange Prize for Fiction and the Commonwealth Writer’s Prize for Best First Book in 2005. Her second novel, Half of a Yellow Sun (2006), received even greater critical acclaim. It follows the lives of several characters before and during the Nigerian Civil War and won the 2007 Women’s Prize for Fiction, among many other awards. The New York Times listed it as one of the “100 Most Notable Books of the Year”; The Guardian ranked it 10th on their list of “Best Books since 2000”; and BBC News included it on its list of “100 Most Influential Novels.” Adichie’s third novel, Americanah, explores the experiences of a young Nigerian woman coming to America for the first time and learning to adjust to how she is treated because of her skin color. The novel was heavily influenced by Adichie’s own experiences, as she references in her TED Talk “The Danger of a Single Story,” which is one of the most viewed TED Talks of all time, with over 33 million views. Beyoncé sampled another of Adichie’s TED Talks, “We Should All Be Feminists,” in her song “Flawless” (2013).

The Biafran War, also known as the Nigerian Civil War (1967-1970), and the political instability that followed it greatly impacted Adichie’s family. The Nigerian Civil War began when the Republic of Biafra, populated largely by the Igbo ethnic group, attempted to secede from Nigeria but ultimately failed to win permanent independence. Adichie, an Igbo woman, lost both her maternal and paternal grandparents in this war. The devastation of war and the struggle over national Nigerian identity are major themes in many of her writings, particularly her novel Half of a Yellow Sun.

Adichie’s writings also explore themes of female empowerment and feminism, parents and children, and the importance of allowing individuals to tell their own stories. She has also been an outspoken proponent of LGBT rights in Africa, where relations between members of the same sex are legally forbidden in many countries and sometimes punishable by death.