Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie storyteller, author Presenting: “Shifting Spaces: Identity, Literature and the Emergence of Stories” When: Monday, April 4, 2011 at 8:00PM Where: Webb Auditorium (Building 7A) A reading at Writers & Books When: Monday, April 4, 2011 at 4:00PM Where: 740 University Avenue Video of Lecture WXXI Interview ( Transcript )

Talk Description:

Adichie will explore the ideas of identity and literature and how both have influenced her life as a fiction writer.

Chimamanda Adichie was born in Nigeria, in Abba in Anambra State. She grew up in the university town of Nsukka, and moved to the United States to attend college. Among her degrees are a Masters in Creative Writing from Johns Hopkins and a Masters in African Studies from Yale. She is also the recipient of a 2008 MacArthur Foundation Fellowship. Today, she divides her time between the United States and Nigeria, where she leads an African writers’ workshop.

Her award-winning books of fiction include Half of a Yellow Sun (winner of the Orange Broadband Prize and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award), Purple Hibiscus (winner of the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize and the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, shortlisted for the Orange Prize and John Llewellyn Rhys Prize, and long-listed for the Booker Prize) and The Thing Around Your Neck (shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize). Adichie contributes frequently to publications including Granta, The New Yorker, The Guardian, and others, and is currently working on a new novel. Her work “explores the intersection of the personal and public, placing the intimate details of lives within the larger social and political forces of contemporary Nigeria and America.”