Purple Hibiscus

shortlisted for the Orange Prize 2004 and the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize, longlisted for the Booker Prize and was winner of the Hurston/Wright Legacy award for debut fiction.
    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. Her short fiction has been published in literary journals including
Granta
, and won the International PEN/David Wong award in 2003. She was a Hodder fellow at Princeton University for the 2005–06 academic year. She lives in Nigeria.
Profile of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
    by Clare Garner
    FOR AS LONG AS she can remember, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s hero has been the internationally acclaimed Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe. She grew up in the house previously occupied by him and first read his novels at the precocious age of ten.
Arrow of God
is still her favourite book and, to this day, she returns to his work whenever she wants to rekindle her writing spirit.
    So, picture the thrill when she received an e-mail saying that he admired
Purple Hibiscus
. It was early September and Adichie was sitting in a dusty cyber cafe in Nsukka, where she grew up. She was becoming impatient with the mountain of e-mails and nearly passed over what turned out to be the highest accolade of her life. It read: ‘Just a short note to let you know that our family has been following your career and rejoice with you on every success! Dad has read
Purple Hibiscus
and liked it very much. Give him a call at…’ It was signed by Achebe’s son. ‘It was the best e-mail of my life,’ Adichie delights. ‘My idol was telling me I was doing a good job. I was so ecstatic. I went slightly crazy.’
    With wisdom beyond her years, Adichie forbids herself to read reviews. It is not that she fears criticism; besides, reviewers rave about her work. She simply does not want to be distracted by what they say. ‘It would get in the way of my being true to myself,’ she says. But feedback from Achebe is another story.So far she has been too shy to call, but she will do soon.
    ‘Reading Achebe gave me permission to write about my world.’
    Adichie has been writing since the age of six. At first she crafted stories for her mother, complete with illustrations, which were inspired by the English children’s classics on which she was reared. ‘I didn’t visit England until I was older, so before then I was very much writing fantasy. Reading Achebe gave me permission to write about my world. He transported me to a past that was both familiar and unfamiliar, a past I imagined my great grandfather lived. Looking back, I realize that what he did for me at the time was validate my history, make it seem worthy in some way.’
    Adichie has spent most of her life on a university campus, first in Nigeria and then in America. Her parents both worked at the University of Nigeria, in Nsukka: her father as Professor of Statistics and her mother as the institution’s first female registrar. They raised Adichie and her five siblings in a university-owned house and sent them to school on campus. Adichie started out reading medicine there but, after a year, realized she was only training to be a doctor because that was the done thing for high achievers like herself. She transferred to Connecticut State University to read Communication. ‘I love the American sense of “can do” and will always be grateful for the fact that you can come here and feelsuffused with this sense of possibility. I couldn’t have published my novel in Nigeria without the money to pay the publisher.’
    But her heart longs for home. Indeed,
Purple Hibiscus
was born out of such longing. ‘I was living in Connecticut and hadn’t been back to Nigeria for four years. I was intensely homesick. It was winter here and terribly cold. I looked out and saw this blanket of white and thought: “I want home.”
    ‘I wanted to write about colonialism, which I think every African writer does without meaning to. The way we are is very much the result of colonialism – the fact that I think in English, for example.’ Her vehicle was religion, an abiding obsession since her early teens. As a child she went to Mass and Benediction every Sunday and loved the drama of it all: the incense, the vibrant singing in Latin, the big hugs after the services. Theology became her thing. ‘I feel sorry for my parents. I really wasn’t your average teenager. Until about 19 I