The Writer as Two Selves: Reflections on the Private Act of Writing and the Public Act of Citizenship

Born in Nigeria, novelist Chimamanda Adichie is the author of Purple Hibiscus (2003), which was nominated for a Booker Prize, and Half of a Yellow Sun (2006), which won the 2007 Orange Prize for Fiction and revolves around the Biafran war of 1967-70. She has recently published a collection of short stories titled The Thing around Your Neck (2009). She was a MacArthur fellow in 2008. She has been a visiting writer at Wesleyan University and at Princeton University, where she was a Hodder fellow.