Storyteller: Humanizing Stories for the World
“Literature,” says Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, “is the best way of humanizing people.” Considering a character’s motivation, she believes, “forces us to look beyond stereotype.” An internationally celebrated author, Adichie conducts workshops for young writers in her native Nigeria, where she emphasizes that “storytelling is rooted in our political, our social, our emotional realities,” and encourages participants to read carefully, write enthusiastically, and keep their day jobs.
Educated in both Nigeria and the United States, Adichie completed a master’s degree in the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins in 2003, followed by another in Africana Studies from Yale in 2008. That same year, she received a MacArthur Foundation “genius grant.” Her published work, which includes three novels, short stories poems, essays, and a play, has been translated into more than thirty languages. She has received many accolades, including the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Purple Hibiscus, the Orange Prize for Half of a Yellow Sun, and the National Book Critics Circle Award for Americanah. In 2016, Adichie returned to the Homewood campus to receive a Doctor of Humane Letters degree honoris causa from Johns Hopkins “for always striving to put a human face on life-changing events and class struggles, to force a greater understanding.” The American Academy of Arts and Sciences inducted Adichie into its 2017 cohort, one of the highest honors for intellectuals in the United States.
Critics praise Adichie’s imaginative writing, which is often based on fact. Her work is centered on Nigeria and Africa, “because it is what I know and it is where my heart is.” She sees writing as her vocation, something she “was born to do.” Adichie admits to being “an unrepentant eavesdropper and a collector of stories. I record bits of overheard dialogue. I ask questions. I watch the world.”
Adichie is in great demand as a speaker internationally, and has given two TED Talks viewed by millions. Recognizing that she now occupies a position of privilege, Adichie encourages her listeners to confront racism and find effective ways to negotiate sexism. ”My own definition of a feminist is a man or a woman who says, ‘Yes, there’s a problem with gender as it is today and we must fix it, we must do better.’ All of us, women and men, must do better.”