Nigerian Author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie ‘Devastated’ by Death of Son

A key figure in postcolonial feminist literature, her work explores themes around gender and immigration.

In 2015, she was listed as one of Time Magazine’s 100 most influential people.

Adichie, 48, had her first child, a daughter, in 2016. In 2024, her twin boys were born using a surrogate.

In 2020, her 2006 novel Half of a Yellow Sun was voted the best book to have won the Women’s Prize for Fiction in its 25-year history.

Speaking to the BBC last year around the release of her novel Dream Count, she stressed how she wanted her books to be read in Africa.

She also explained how the writer’s block she had experienced while pregnant with her first child was “terrifying”.

“It’s a really frightening place to be, because writing is the thing that gives me meaning,” the acclaimed author told Emma Barnett.

In 2022, in a BBC lecture on freedom of speech, the writer said young people were growing up “afraid to ask questions for fear of asking the wrong questions”.

Such a climate could lead to “the death of curiosity, the death of learning and the death of creativity”, she said during one of the BBC’s annual Reith lectures.

“No human endeavour requires freedom as much as creativity does,” she added. BBC