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Adichie Wins Orange Prize
By Paul Ohia with agency reports, 06.07.2007
Nigerian author, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, was, at a colourful ceremony in London yesterday, awarded the twelfth Orange Broadband Prize for Fiction with her second novel, Half of a Yellow Sun.
With this achievement – which follows her earlier feat of reaching the finals in 2004 with his novel Purple Hibiscus – she bec-omes the first African and the youngest author to win the prestigious award at 29.
The contest was instituted in 1996 for the best novel of the year written in English by a woman and the 12th person worldwide.
Adichie received the award during a ceremony at London's Royal Festival Hall for the novel which focuses on the haunting look at Biafra's struggle in the late 1960s to break away from Nigeria.
She beat an Indian-born contenders, Kiran Desai, to clinch to much coveted prize of 30,000 pounds (N7.6m).
At the awards ceremony hosted by Orange Broadband Prize for Fiction Co-Founder and Honorary Director, Kate Mosse, the 2007 Chair of Judges, Muriel Gray, presented the author with the prize and the 'Bessie', a limited edition bronze figurine.
Soon after winning yesterday, Chimamanda told THISDAY that she was very glad to win the award. "My handbag was stolen yesterday at the book signing, so I thought it was a bad omen," she said. According to her, having won the award, the first thing was to call her parents in Nigeria. "The story in the book about the civil war is very important for me," she also said.
Muriel Gray, Chair of Judges, said: "The judges and I were hugely impressed by the power, ambition and skill of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's novel. It's astonishing, not just in the skillful subject matter, but in the brilliance of its accessibility. This is a moving and important book by an incredibly exciting author."
Pippa Dunn, Brand Marketing Director for Orange UK, commented: "The Orange Broadband Prize for Fiction goes from strength to strength and we are delighted to be able to support such a powerful platform for the promotion of outstanding international fiction written by women. This year has seen another exceptional shortlist, but in the end, there can be only one winner - many congratulations to Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie."
The Orange Broadband Prize for Fiction was set to celebrate and promote fiction written by women throughout the world to the widest range of readers possible.
Chimamanda was born in 1977. She is from Aba, in Anambra State, but grew up in the university town of Nsukka. Her first novel Purple Hibiscus was shortlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction in 2004 and the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize, longlisted for the Man Booker Prize and won the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award for debut fiction. Half of a Yellow Sun was selected for The Richard and Judy Book Club 2007.
This year's winner, Half of a Yellow Sun, is set in Nigeria during the 1960s, at the time of the vicious Nigeria- Biafra war in which more than a million people died. Three characters are swept up in the rapidly unfolding political events. Ugwu, a boy from a poor village, is employed as a houseboy for a university lecturer. Olanna, a young, middle-class woman, has come to live with the professor, abandoning her privileged life in Lagos for a dusty university town and the charismatic idealism of her new lover. Richard is a tall, shy Englishman, in thrall to Olanna's twin sister Kainene, who refuses to belong to anyone.
They are propelled into events that will pull them apart and bring them together in the most unexpected ways. As Nigerian troops advance and they run for their lives, their ideals - and their loyalties to each other - are severely tested. This novel is about Africa, about moral responsibility, the end of colonialism, ethnic allegiances, class and race and about how love can complicate all these things.
Source: This Day, 7th June 2007.
With Orange in hand, the English rob Chimamanda
On Wednesday her epic novel about the Biafra war won Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie the Orange prize. In her first interview since, she tells Stephen Moss that she wants to show how the west doesn't get Africa
CHIMAMANDA Ngozi Adichie is distraught - an unusual reaction to winning the Orange prize. It transpires that her handbag was stolen at a book signing in London on Tuesday, the night before the prize-giving, and she has lost her credit cards and a notebook full of novelistic jottings. She barely slept on Tuesday from rage and dismay. "I still can't believe that someone stole it, and am hoping for a miracle," she says. "So it's a good thing I won," she adds, cheering up, "or I'd have wondered why the heck I even came to England."
Her stolen handbag strikes me as a useful metaphor for much of what we talk about - the exploding of stereotypes. Nigerian author comes from the "crime hell" of her own country and gets robbed at an oh-so-genteel book reading at the sparkly new Royal Festival Hall. "I've never had any problems in Lagos," she says, "so to come to London and have it happen here ..."
Adichie resists stereotypical views of Africa. "We have a long history of Africa being seen in ways that are not very complimentary, and in America where she has been studying for the past 10 years being seen as an African writer comes with baggage that we don't necessarily care for. Americans think African writers will write about the exotic, about wildlife, poverty, maybe Aids. They come to Africa and African books with certain expectations. I was told by a professor at Johns Hopkins University that he didn't believe my first book Purple Hibiscus, published in 2003 because it was too familiar to him. In other words, I was writing about middle-class Africans who had cars and who weren't starving to death, and therefore to him it wasn't authentically African."
She is determined to show an Africa that isn't one huge refugee camp - a continent with many diverse stories, not a single story of suffering and dependency. "People forget that Africa is a place in which class exists," she says. "It's as if Africans are not allowed to have class, that somehow authenticity is synonymous with poverty and demands your pity and your sympathy. Africa is seen as the place where the westerner goes to sort out his morality issues. We see it in films and in lots of books about Africa, and it's very troubling to me."
She is sceptical about the impact of western celebrities who embrace Africa. "What I find problematic is the suggestion that when, say, Madonna adopts an African child, she is saving Africa. It's not that simple. You have to do more than go there and adopt a child or show us pictures of children with flies in their eyes. That simplifies Africa. If you followed the media you'd think that everybody in Africa was starving to death, and that's not the case; so it's important to engage with the other Africa."
Adichie's Orange prize-winning novel, Half of a Yellow Sun, is again about the "other Africa", peopled by the sort of empowered, middle-class Africans in whom her professor so foolishly refused to believe. Two twin sisters, daughters of a wealthy businessman, are caught up in the Nigerian-Biafran war of 1967-70. Adichie, an Igbo from the south-eastern corner of Nigeria that attempted to secede as Biafra, traces the tragedy of that war, which is estimated to have cost three million lives. But, by some literary sleight of hand, she does it without annihilating the reader's senses. There is blood, gore, nightmarish horror; but there is also drink, talk, friendship, shared struggle, and lots of sex. You can see why Richard and Judy chose it for their book club - a move that shot the novel into the bestseller lists.
Another key character in Half of a Yellow Sun - the title comes from the emblem of the Biafran flag - is Ugwu, a houseboy from a poor village who gets caught up with the preachy, privileged, highly politicised group of independence- seekers, is conscripted into the Biafran army, and emerges as the conscience of the novel. In a neat twist, it becomes clear that he will write a book on the war, rather than the Englishman who throughout has been making notes for a history of the struggle. Africans must write their own stories, not let the west do the naming for them, as they have for a bloody century and more.
Adichie, who is only 29, says she finds CNN's coverage of Africa "exhausting" because of its refusal to let Africans do the talking. "They go to the Congo, for example, line the Congolese people up in the background, and then have a Belgian, who they say is a Congo expert, tell us about the Congo. And I think, 'Well, how about you bring the Congolese forward so we know what life is really like?' Sometimes I think, 'Wouldn't it be wonderful if I could become the voice explaining America or England to the world.' It would never happen."
As in her novel, Adichie manages to make strong political points in a glancing, matter-of-fact way. She doesn't do sermonising, even when she's smuggling in a sermon. When I ask her why a white character plays a central part in the book, she says it was with an eye on the film rights. Hollywood insists on it; in fact, she now wishes she'd had more. "That's a joke, by the way," she adds hurriedly. Except it's a joke which contains a truth: Hollywood does demand troubled, transformative white characters to make Africa accessible to a predominantly white audience.
Taking on the Biafran war - the great story of her people, a struggle still etched in the collective memory - in her 20s shows a certain chutzpah. "I thought that I was ready to try," she says, "though I wasn't sure that it would work. I started writing about Biafra when I was 16. I wrote a very bad play, but that at least shows that I have long been interested in the subject. I had interviewed my father, poor man, endlessly before I wrote this play, and I very meticulously used everything he told me. I was manipulating characters just so they would fit in with what my father was doing."
She also wrote an angry short story with the same title as the novel, but when she came to write the book, some of the anger had abated. Adichie lost both her grandfathers in the war - the book is dedicated to their memory - but even though that made writing the novel painful, she still sought a degree of detachment. "In the short story I was much closer to things," she says. "I was more heartbroken. But by the time I came to the novel I had realised that for fiction to be really successful, you have to be a few steps removed. My book has Biafran sympathies, but I recognise that Biafra wasn't perfect."
Nigeria is still coming to terms with the war 40 years on, and Adichie hopes her book contributes to that. "We don't learn about this in school. In Nigerian history we get to 1967 and just move straight on to 1970. For a lot of Nigerians this is really a work of history, and it's very gratifying for me to hear from Nigerians in particular - because, in the end, it is the opinion of Nigerians that matters most - who say, 'My parents lived through the war and nobody ever talked about it until your book appeared.' "
Adichie's parents are academics, and hers is a high-achieving family. Her elder sister is a doctor and initially she planned to follow her, but realised she didn't care about medicine. She had loved books and writing from the age of seven. She says she was in tears when she told her father she had won the prize. "I was surprised at how excited he was. He was singing an Igbo song, a thank-you song to God. My father's a very reserved and quiet man, very calm and stoic, and I thought he'd say, 'Oh, well done,' but no, he started singing and dancing, and I started crying because it was very moving."
Adichie considers Nigeria her home, but says she will continue to spend part of her time in the US, where her sister works. She is doing a master's course in African Studies at Yale, which she says gives her access to material she would never find in Nigeria, and teaches creative writing. Despite the success of Half of a Yellow Sun, she reckons she will still need to teach to provide a steady income. "Creative writing programmes are not very necessary," she says. "They just exist so that people like us can make a living." But surely after being deified by Richard and Judy, racking up huge sales, and now winning the Orange prize, she's secure? "I think you just get this once in your life," she says.
Originally entitled 'Madonna not our saviour', this piece first appeared last Friday in The Guardian of London.
Source: Guardian, 11th June 2007.
Nigerian writers laud Chimamanda's Orange Prize win
By Uduma Kalu
NIGERIAN writers around the globe have risen in praise of one of their own, Chimamanda Ngozi Adiche, who won this year's Orange Prize for fiction.
Adichie won the 12th Orange Broadband Prize for Fiction with her second novel Half of a Yellow Sun.
Another Nigerian writer, Diana Evans, author of 26a, last year won the first ever Orange Award for New Writers.
The prize was established in 2005 as part of the Orange Prize for Fiction 10th year celebrations. Diana was presented with a ?10,000 bursary from the Arts Council of England.
Reacting to the development, President, Association of Nigerian Authors, (ANA), Dr. Wale Okediran, while speaking with The Guardian described Chimamanda's success as a good omen.
"It will also serve as an inspiration to younger Nigerian writers who are finding it hard to write and publish in the country. Her effort is also good news to Nigerians as they will see that writing is something to be encouraged," he added.
ANA National Secretary-General, Mr. Denga Abdullahi, simply described the feat as "splendid."
"This is another confirmation of the excellence in the spirit of the ordinary Nigerian, if only those who lead us will allow us to flourish," he said further.
ANA Public Relations Officer, Hyacinth Obunseh, said Adiche's clinching of the Orange Prize at this time showed that great writings still come from Nigeria.
"It underscores the point that our women writers did not go back into their shells after breaking the silence in 1999 as being touted in some quarters. We are proud of her. It confirms that our literature is alive and well. We expect more soon," he said.
For such writers as Prof. Obi Iwuanyanwu, a United States-based literature teacher, Adiche's prize win calls for serious reflection.
"Now we will have to address the significance of Adiche in contemporary Nigerian literary praxis. We will have to ask why Nigerian literature has been in the doldrums since Wole Soyinka's Nobel Prize in 1986 and Ben Okri's Booker Prize in 1991. What made the writing of the third generation's Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka, and Christopher Okigbo as globally commanding as the writing of the first generation's Olaudah Equiano? What made the writing of the second generation as weak as the writing of the fourth generation and much of the fifth generation?" he asked.
For him, Adiche has rediscovered the magic of great art and serious discourse. She has eschewed pretentiousness and self-flagellation; and taken the bull by the horn by calling a spade a spade.
Adiche was born in Nigeria in 1977. She is from Abba, in Anambra State, but grew up in the university town of Nsukka. Her first novel Purple Hibiscus, which won the Commonwealth first book prize, was also shortlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction in 2004, the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize and long-listed for the Man Booker Prize. She won the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award for the debut fiction. Half of a Yellow Sun was selected for The Richard and Judy Book Club 2007.
The novel is set in Nigeria during the 1960s, at the time of the vicious Nigeria-Biafra war in which more than a million people died.
At an award ceremony at the Royal Festival Hall, Southbank Centre, London hosted by Orange Broadband Prize for Fiction co-founder and Honorary Director, Kate Mosse, the 2007 chair of judges, Muriel Gray, presented the author with the ?30,000 prize and the 'Bessie', a limited edition bronze figurine. Both are anonymously endowed.
The Orange Broadband Prize for Fiction was set up in 1996 to celebrate and promote fiction written by women throughout the world to the widest range of readers possible. The Orange Prize is awarded to the best novel of the year written in the English Language by a woman.
Sourcee: The Guardian, 8th June 2007.
Adichie, Nigerian Novelist, Wins World Prize
By Agency Reporter
Nigerian author, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, won the Orange Broadband Prize for Fiction, collecting 30,000 pounds ($59,775) and a bronze statuete called the Bessie after defeating competition from Anne Tyler and four other finalists in the United Kingdom's annual literary award for women.
Adichie received the award during a ceremony at London's Royal Festival Hall for her second novel, Half of a Yellow Sun, a haunting look at Biafra's struggle in the late 1960s to break away from Nigeria.
This year's finalists had a strong international flavour, both in their nationalities and in their subject matter.
Contenders included Indian-born Kiran Desai, whose The Inheritance of Loss explores how globalization influences a Himalayan village, and Xiaolu Guo from China, author of A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers, a romance.
Tyler, a Pulitzer Prize winner, was named for Digging to America, which wryly probes the complexities of identity and belonging through the lives of two American couples who adopt Korean infants.
Adichie's Half of a Yellow Sun, a Fourth Estate and Knopf title, focuses on a small group of characters to describe the civil war that erupted in Nigeria in 1967, when the Igbo people attempted to establish Biafra.
At its heart are twin sisters, beautiful Olanna and homely yet shrewd Kainene. Both have disappointed their wealthy father with their choice of lovers: Olanna by falling for a charismatic academic with revolutionary dreams, Kainene by taking up with a struggling English author.
Ugwu, a 13-year-old houseboy, looks on as political violence eclipses these domestic dramas.
Epic in its emotional scope, this finely crafted saga depicts massacres, starvation and forced conscription with heartbreaking humanity, grappling with colonialism and tribalism, class and race. It's also infused, miraculously, with humour.
Born in Nigeria in 1977, Adichie was an Orange finalist in 2004 with her first novel, Purple Hibiscus. The daughter of a college professor, she grew up on the Nsukka campus of the University of Nigeria, in a house once occupied by novelist and erstwhile Biafran diplomat, Prof. Chinua Achebe.
She later studied in the United State, where she obtained a masters degree in creative writing from Johns Hopkins University and served as a Hodder Fellow at Princeton. She currently divides her time between Nigeria and the US, where she's pursuing graduate work in African studies at Yale.
Formerly known as the Orange Prize, the award is sponsored by the Orange brand of France Telecom SA and was designed to recognize novels that display "excellence, originality and accessibility.'' The prize has previously gone to authors such as Zadie Smith for On Beauty and Lionel Shriver for We Need to Talk About Kevin.
Adichie received the anonymously endowed prize at a champagne reception in the ballroom of newly refurbished Royal Festival Hall. Other finalists included Rachel Cusk for Arlington Park and Jane Harris for The Observations.
Also presented this evening was the 10,000-pound Orange Broadband Award for New Writers. Now in its third year and open to debut works of fiction written in English and published in the U.K., it was snagged by Karen Connelly for her Burma-set thriller, "The Lizard Cage.''
Source: Punch, 7th June 2007.
A Nigerian Author Looking Unflinchingly at the Past
By CHARLES McGRATH
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's new novel, "Half of a Yellow Sun," takes place in her native Nigeria during the late 1960's and early 70's, when civil war erupted as the eastern state of Biafra attempted to
break away and was then forced into submission. Countless families were uprooted, including her own, and hundreds of thousands of Biafrans starved to death, died of illness or were murdered.
All this took place years before Ms. Adichie, who just turned 29, was born, and yet she writes about these events with deep feeling and unflinching vividness.
"My family tells me that I must be old," she said in a recent interview. "This is a book I had to write because it's my way of looking at this history that defines me and making sense of it. The writing took four years, but I've been thinking about this book my whole life."
Talking about the ethnic divisions that were largely responsible for the war and that have persisted in Nigeria to this day, she added: "Of course we can bloody well live together. Nigeria was really set up to fail. The extent of that failure is what we have to accept responsibility for, but we weren't set up for success."
The fifth of sixth children, Ms. Adichie (pronounced "ah-DEE-chee-eh) grew up in Nsukka, a university town, where her mother was an administrator and her father a professor of statistics. The family lived, as it happened, in a house formerly occupied by the great Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe, whose work she began to read when she was about 10.
"It was Achebe's fiction that made me realize my own story could be in a book," she said. "When I started to write, I was writing Enid Blyton stories, even though I had never been to England. I didn't think it was possible for people like me to be in books."
Though she had been writing for almost as long as she could remember, and even published a book of poetry when she was 16 — "really bad, awful poetry," she says now — Ms. Adichie began studying medicine in college because, as she explained, "if you do well in school in Nigeria, everyone just expects you to be a doctor."
Largely to get away from her medical studies, she moved to the United States in 1997 — first to Philadelphia and then to Connecticut, where her sister was living. While attending Eastern Connecticut State University, in Willimantic, she wrote her first novel, "Purple Hibiscus," which was shortlisted for the 2004 Orange Prize and won the 2005 Commonwealth Writers' Best First Book Prize.
"Purple Hibiscus" is in some ways a conventional coming-of-age story, about the sexual and moral awakening of a shy, bookish teenager, but it's focused through two unusual lenses. In the foreground, at times dominating the story the way he dominates his family, is the narrator's father. He is a factory owner, newspaper publisher and a public hero, but also a private tyrant, a convert to Roman Catholicism so fanatical that he tortures his children for minor transgressions.
And in the background is ever-present political turmoil and uncertainty, a pervasive atmosphere of oppression that Ms. Adichie says is a composite of the Babangida regime of the late 1980's and the Abacha dictatorship of the 90's.
"Half of a Yellow Sun" (Fourth Estate), which Janet Maslin in her review in The New York Times called "instantly enthralling," is based on real events and is bigger and looser in structure than its predecessor. It is told mostly from three points of view: those of Ugwu, a houseboy from the bush who comes to work in the household of a radical, slogan-spouting professor; Olanna, the professor's sexy, London-educated girlfriend; and Richard, a white man who is sensitive and well-meaning but also a little clueless and ineffectual.
The book begins, in fact, as a kind of social comedy and doesn't darken until the war breaks out. Ugwu's employer, for all his radicalism, carries on a bit like a colonial master, calling his houseboy "my good man," and Ugwu, eager to please, responds by burning his master's socks while trying to iron them. There are visits from Olanna's father, a ridiculously wealthy "Big Man," and mother, and also from the professor's mother, who is opposed to his relationship with Olanna, and greets her by saying, "I hear you did not suck your mother's breasts."
"I didn't want to just write about events," Ms. Adichie said. " I wanted to put a human face on them. And I also wanted to explore class — the outsider and the insider — and how war changes all that."
She did a great deal of research, she added, but wound up throwing most of it out. Her main source was her father, who lost almost everything during the war — his home, his books, his own father. At the time of the interview he had just started reading "Half of a Yellow Sun." She was pretty sure he would approve of her handling of history, Ms. Adichie said, but was a little worried about how he might react to the sex scenes.
Now that the book is done, Ms. Adichie is going back to school, enrolling in a master's program in African history at . "I thought it was time I finally studied Africa," she said, adding, "I'm sure it will improve my writing." And she said that she foresaw eventually dividing her time between Nigeria and the United States, where she is gradually learning to feel at home.
"When I first got here, I was appalled," she said. "People eat while walking in the street. My professors would sit down on the lawn with their students and have a sandwich. You'd never see that in Nigeria."
But just recently, she said, she had startled herself by starting to feel defensive about the United States. "America is like a very rich uncle who doesn't really know who you are," she added. "But all the same, you can't help being fond of him."
Source: New York Times, 23rd September 2006.
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