Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's most far-reaching honor -- ep. by Jewell Humphrey

A short take about a far-reaching honor bestowed on Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Written by Jewell Humphrey 
Read by Kassandra Timm

Transcript

Americanah.
Half of a Yellow Sun.
The Thing Around Your Neck.
Purple Hibiscus. 

If you know and love these titles then you know and love Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. She is an award-winning novelist with 22 literary awards and counting. 

You’re listening to Remarkable Receptions, a podcast about popular and critical responses to African American novels and more.

Adichie received the MacArthur Foundation Genius Grant in 2008, the year she turned 31 years old. At that point, she had published two novels – Purple Hibiscus and Half of a Yellow Sun. So she received this award of over $500,000 at an early stage of her career.  

Octavia Butler, Suzan Lori-Parks, and Jesmyn Ward, among other Black women writers received the MacArthur, which is to say, Adichie is in good company. 

Adichie is the recipient of various other awards, including the Women’s Prize for Fiction, an Author of the Year Award, the North Star Award, and the Young Lion’s Fiction Award.  But perhaps her most far-reaching honor was bestowed on her by the Queen. That is, Beyoncé. 

In 2014, in her song “Flawless,” Beyoncé included an excerpt from a TED talk that Adichie had given. Beyonce’s inclusion of just 1 minute of Adichie’s talk gave Adichie a level of fame that she had not previously received with her novels and formal awards.  

Her sampled speech criticizes sexism, saying “We teach girls to shrink themselves, to make themselves smaller.” Adichie’s voice, if not her name, became immediately familiar to a massive audience.

Formal literary awards can benefit the literary reputations of writers. And in one case, we saw that inclusion on a song by a world-renown superstar can greatly contributed to an author’s remarkable reception.    

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This episode, written by Jewell Humphrey, contributes to a series of compositions by participants in the Data Rangers Fellowship. The episode was edited by Elizabeth Cali and Howard Rambsy. 

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This podcast, Remarkable Receptions, is part of the Black Literature Network, a joint project from African American literary studies at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville and the History of Black Writing at the University of Kansas. The project was made possible by the generous support of the Mellon Foundation.  For more information, visit blacklitnetwork.org.