I read Half of a Yellow Sun as part of the #ReadingWomen challenge, as it won the Women’s Prize in 2007. Adichie’s TEDx talk, ‘We should all be feminists’, has been viewed more than seven million times and helped make her one of the most prominent feminist commentators of our times.“There are some things that are so unforgivable that they make other things easily forgivable.”

Americanah, her third novel, won the National Book Critics Circle Award. Her first novel, Purple Hibiscus, won the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best First Book Half of a Yellow Sun, her second, was awarded the Orange Prize for Fiction and was later voted the ‘Winner of Winners’ of this prize in its 25-year history. Adichie was inspired to write as a child after reading the work of Chinua Achebe her novels and stories have often examined questions of Nigerian identity, marriage and gender roles, and post-colonial politics. Adichie has lived in the United States for much of her adult life, and has been awarded master’s degrees in creative writing from Johns Hopkins and African studies from Yale she was also a MacArthur Fellow and held fellowships at Harvard and Princeton universities.

However, while the symbol of Biafra – half of a yellow sun – is displayed on the flag, there is still hope for peaceful resolution.Ĭhimamanda Ngozi Adichie is a Nigerian-born novelist. As discord mounts and war rages, their world is upended.

The professor’s ‘illogically beautiful’ girlfriend Olanna is a chief’s daughter who has eschewed her family’s wealth to follow her heart, while her twin sister Kainene is a headstrong businesswoman who drops her guard when she falls for English ex-pat Richard. When village boy Ugwu moves to town to work for university professor Odenigbo, his eyes are opened to the Igbo intellectual class and the opportunities that education offers. Such has been its impact on the literary scene, shining a light on Nigerian history, the scars of colonialism, and the tensions between Igbo and Yoruba cultures that led to civil war, that it is considered a modern classic. In 2020, Half of a Yellow Sun was awarded the prestigious Women’s Prize for Fiction ‘Winner of Winners’ accolade to mark the 25th anniversary of the prize.

Adichie half of a yellow sun