One of the shining lights in African literature and an award-winning Nigerian writer, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, will be privileged to share a lifetime award of W.E.B Du Bois with the likes of Chinua Achebe, ‘father of African literature’, Mohammed Ali, ‘the greatest’, and Oprah Winfrey at the Harvard University award.
Newsonline reports that Chimamanda Adichie, author of Purple Hisbiscus will be honoured with the award on October 6, 2022.
The ‘Americana’ author, Chimamanda was the Harvard College Class Day Speaker in 2018 and was previously a Harvard Radcliffe Institute Fellow (2011-2012).
In an announcement on Monday, the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research announced in The Harvard Gazette that Chimamanda and six others will receive the medal as people “who embody the values of commitment and resolve that are fundamental to the Black experience in America.”
The W.E.B. Du Bois medal is the highest honour given by Harvard in the field of African and African American studies. The award comes nearly three years after it had been halted at the onset of the pandemic. Past recipients include Oprah Winfrey, Maya Angelou, Muhammad Ali, Steven Spielberg, Ava Duvernay and Chinua Achebe.
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In 2018, ‘Half of a Yellow’ Sun author, Chimamanda was awarded the PEN Pinter Prize, named after Nobel Laureate Harold Pinter, given annually to a writer of “outstanding literary merit who shows a fierce intellectual determination.” The award was jointly shared with imprisoned Saudi lawyer and human rights activist Waleed Abulkhair.
Chimamanda has received 16 honorary doctorate degrees from some of the world’s leading universities, is a member of both the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Her first novel, Purple Hibiscus (2003), won the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize. Her second, Half of a Yellow Sun (2006), won the Orange Prize for Fiction (subsequently the Bailey’s Prize, and now the Women’s Prize for Fiction). Her third novel, Americanah (2013), won the US National Book Critics Circle Award and was named one of the New York Times Top 10 Best Books of the year.
