Nigerian Female Writer Battles American Colleagues Over $50,000 Prize

                               
Nigerian female writer, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s new novel, ‘Americanah’ has been shortlisted for the $50,000 Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction.

The literary accolade is reserved only for female writers in English from around the world.
Chimamanda’s book would have to battle against Americans Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Lowland and Donna Tartt’s Goldfinch.

“Americanah,” a novel about race and identity has already won the US National Book Critics Circle prize for fiction.
It was chosen over “The Goldfinch” author Donna Tartt and three other finalists.
The other finalists for the Bailey Prize are “Burial Rites,” an Icelandic murder mystery by Australia’s Hannah Kent; Irish author Audrey Magee’s World War II story “The Undertaking”; and British-Irish writer Eimear McBride’s impressionistic “A Girl is a Half-formed Thing.
Chimamanda won in 2010 for “Half of a Yellow Sun.”
The winner of the prize, previously known as the Orange Prize, will be announced on June 4.
Chimamanda was born on the 15th September, 1977 in the city of Enugu.
She is the fifth of six children in an Igbo family in the university town of Nsukka in southeastern Nigeria, where the University of Nigeria is situated.
After writing so many books such as Purple Hibiscus, Half of a Yellow Sun and Americanah she has been called “the most prominent” of a “procession of critically acclaimed young anglophone authors that is succeeding in attracting a new generation of readers to African literature”.