Our season-four opener: Adichie on the discarded narrator of Half of a Yellow Sun and the memoirs she read until she stopped being frightened.
How it went
Nine hundred seats, gone in a morning. The best exchange came from the floor — a history student who challenged the 1967 dinner-table scene, and got a ten-minute answer.
About Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Women's Prize for Fiction, 2007
Women's Prize 'Winner of Winners', 2020
MacArthur Fellowship, 2008
Born in Enugu and raised on the University of Nigeria campus in Nsukka, Adichie left medicine for literature and published Purple Hibiscus at twenty-six. Her second novel, Half of a Yellow Sun, took four years and a discarded narrator, and remains the book she is asked about most. She divides her time between Lagos and the United States and runs an annual writing workshop in Nigeria.