Weekly Geeks: Author Fun Facts

I love this week's assignment for Weekly Geeks: fun facts about authors.

The directions:
1. Choose a writer you like.
2. Using resources such as Wikipedia, the author’s website, whatever you can find, make a list of interesting facts about the author.
3. Post your fun facts list in your blog, maybe with a photo of the writer, a collage of his or her books, whatever you want.
4. Sign the Mr Linky at Weekly Geeks with the url to your fun facts post.
5. As you run into (or deliberately seek out) other Weekly Geeks’ lists, add links to your post for authors you like or authors you think your readers are interested in.

Of course the dilemma is choosing the author. My first thoughts were Harper Lee and Flannery O'Connor, but I've decided instead to find out about Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. I read her Half of a Yellow Sun a month or so ago and thought it was amazing. Guatami Tripathy at Reading Room wrote a series of reviews of Adichie's short stories that definitely makes me want to read more.

So who is Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie? Here is her website. I learned there that Adichie was born in 1977 to Igbo parents in Nigeria. She came to the U.S. at age 19, graduated summa cum laude from Eastern Connecticut State, and received a master's degree in creative writing from Johns Hopkins.

Her short stories and novels center on the struggles of the Igbo people and the struggles of Nigerian immigrants today in the U.S. and England. According to her website, "Although Adichie was born seven years after the war [Nigerian Civil War] ended, she states that she 'ha[s] always felt a deep horror for all the bestialities that took place and great pity for the injustices that occurred.'"

Her works include:
Novels: Purple Hibiscus and Half of a Yellow Sun
Play: For the Love of Biafra
Poetry: Decisions
And a long list of uncollected poems and short stories

I really liked this article about Adichie from the BBC News website. This is the kind of information that goes beyond the Wikipedia biography and adds depth to the facts:

For Ms. Adichie, Half of a Yellow Sun is not some distant tale of the horrors of Nigeria's three-year Biagran civil war. Her grandfather died in a refugee camp during the war, a fact, she says, which still made her cry while she was writing the award-winning book.

No wonder it was such a heart-wrenching book. If you haven't read it, please do. I plan to check out Purple Hibiscus in the next couple of weeks.