Adichie wins Orange Prize For Fiction

Date: June 11, 2007 | Discussion: No Comments

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie has won the 2007 Orange Broadband Prize for Fiction, a £30,000 award given annually for the best English-language novel by a female author of any nationality. This was the 12th time the award was handed out.

Half of a Yellow Sun
by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

This highly anticipated novel from Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is set in Nigeria during the 1960s, at the time of a vicious civil war in which a million people died and thousands were massacred in cold blood. The three main characters in the novel are swept up in the violence during these turbulent years. One is a young boy from a poor village who is employed at a university lecturer’s house. The other is a young middle-class woman, Olanna, who has to confront the reality of the massacre of her relatives. And the third is a white man, a writer who lives in Nigeria for no clear reason, and who falls in love with Olanna’s twin sister, a remote and enigmatic character. As these people’s lives intersect, they have to question their own responses to the unfolding political events. This extraordinary novel is about Africa in a wider sense: about moral responsibility, about the end of colonialism, about ethnic allegiances, about class and race; and about the ways in which love can complicate all of these things.

You can read more about Half of a Yellow Sun at Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk and Amazon.ca.

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Filed under African literature, English literature, Fiction, Novels, Winners, World literature.

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