Behind the Book — Episode 126
Half of a Yellow Sun: Writing a War You Were Born After
Nora Ellis in conversation with Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Recorded August 19, 2026 · 01:55
https://behindthebookfm.com/episodes/half-of-a-yellow-sun

This interview is a voiced dramatisation written by our team, drawn from the
author's publicly documented remarks on craft.

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[00:00] Nora Ellis:
You often say you were a child who read everything in the house. What did that do to you as a writer?

[00:06] Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie:
It made writing feel ordinary, in the best way. Books were furniture in our house, so making one didn't seem like a mystical act. It seemed like work you could learn. And because I read mostly English novels first, I also learned early that the people in books didn't look like me. That absence is what pushed me to write my own.

[00:26] Nora Ellis:
Half of a Yellow Sun took you four years and a great deal of research. How do you keep research from swallowing a novel?

[00:35] Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie:
I read until I stopped feeling afraid. That's my measure. Fear makes you over-explain, and over-explaining kills a scene. Once I could hear the way people spoke at a particular kind of dinner table in 1967, I put the books away and stayed with the characters. History gives you weather. It shouldn't give you speeches.

[00:58] Nora Ellis:
Was there a moment you thought the book wouldn't work?

[01:02] Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie:
Many. There's a version of it in a drawer with an entirely different narrator, and it was dead on the page. I had to admit that after two years. That's the part nobody tells you about: the courage isn't starting, it's throwing away the thing you have already paid for with your life.

[01:21] Nora Ellis:
What is writing for, for you? Not the career — the act.

[01:25] Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie:
To insist on complication. Single stories flatten people, and flattened people are easy to harm. When I write a character who is difficult and loving and wrong all at once, I'm arguing for that complication. That's the whole purpose, really. Everything else is publishing.

[01:42] Nora Ellis:
One thing to a young writer with a draft they're ashamed of?

[01:47] Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie:
Be ashamed later. Right now, finish the sentence. Shame is a very good editor and a very bad first drafter.