Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie was born in Nigeria in 1977. She is from Abba, in Anambra State, but grew up in the university town of Nsukka, where she attended primary and secondary schools. She went on to receive a BS in Communication and Political Science from Eastern Connecticut State University and an MA from Johns Hopkins University, both in the United States. Her short fiction has been published in literary journals including Granta, and won the International PEN/David Wong award in 2003. 'Purple Hibiscus', her first novel, was shortlisted for the Orange Prize and the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize and was winner of the Hurston/Wright Legacy award for debut fiction. She was a Hodder fellow at Princeton University for the 2005-2006 academic year. She lives in Nigeria.
'Heartbreaking, funny, exquisitely written and, without doubt, a literary masterpiece and a classic.' Daily Mail 'Stunning. It has a ramshackle freedom and exuberant ambition.' Observer 'I look with awe and envy at this young woman from Africa who is recording the history of her country. She is fortunate -- and we, her readers, are even luckier.' Edmund White 'Vividly written, thrumming with life!a remarkable novel. In its compassionate intelligence as in its capacity for intimate portraiture, this novel is a worthy successor to such twentieth-century classics as Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart and V.S. Naipaul's A Bend in the River .' Joyce Carol Oates 'Rarely have I felt so there, in the middle of all that suffering. I wasted the last fifty pages, reading them far too greedily and fast, because I couldn't bear to let go!It is a magnificent second novel -- and can't fail to find the readership it deserves and demands.' Margaret Forster 'Here is a new writer endowed with the gift of ancient storytellers.' Chinua Achebe '[Deserves] a place alongside such works as Pat Barker's Regeneration trilogy and Helen Dunmore's depiction of the Leningrad blockade, The Siege .' Guardian 'A fresh examination of the ravages of war!a welcome addition to the corpus of African letters.' Times Literary Supplement