The Nigerian writer is one of seven recipients of this year’s W.E.B. Du Bois Medal, Harvard University’s highest honor in the field of African and African-American studies. This prestigious award will be presented to them on Thursday, October 6 at the Sanders Theatre, Memorial Hall, 45 Quincy St., Cambridge, Massachusetts.
This year’s recipients, it is explained, “embody the values of commitment and determination that are fundamental to the black experience in America” for their contributions to African and African American culture, announced on Wednesday, September 21, the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research, which will once again present this prestigious award after a hiatus of nearly three years due to the pandemic.
The W.E.B. Du Bois Medal is Harvard University’s highest honor in the field of African and African American studies. This year’s honorees, it says, include basketball legend, cultural critic and activist Kareem Abdul-Jabbar; prominent writer and feminist Chimamanda Adichie; groundbreaking actress and LGBTQ advocate Laverne Cox; philanthropist and arts and education patron Agnes Gund; business pioneer Raymond J. McGuire; former Massachusetts governor Deval Patrick; and pioneering artist and visual storyteller Betye Saar.
Previous honorees include poet Rita Dove (2019), athlete and activist Colin Kaepernick (2018), contemporary artist Carrie Mae Weems and civil rights activist and former congressman John Lewis (2013), director and producer Ava Duvernay, former boxer Muhammad Ali, writer Maya Angelou, producer Shonda Rhimes, Oprah Winfreyand architect David Adjaye.
“Whether they’ve distinguished themselves in the arts, civic life, education, athletics, activism, or any combination of the above, these medalists show in all that they do their unyielding commitment to pushing the boundaries of representation and creating opportunities for advancement and participation for people who have been too often shut out from the great promise of our times,” said Henry Louis Gates Jr., Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and director of the Hutchins Center, in a statement. For his part, Glenn H. Hutchins, chairman of the Hutchins Center and North Island National Advisory Board, said,“At this challenging moment in our civil life, the Hutchins Center Honors returns to assert the vital notion that our best way forward is to root ourselves in common principles of leadership, dialogue, and action, represented by each of medalists across their eclectic fields and heroic endeavors”.
Bookks translated into more than 30 languages
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie was born in Enugu, Nigeria, in 1977. She grew up on the campus of the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, where her father was a professor and her mother the first female Registrar. She studied medicine for a year in Nsukka and then moved to the United States at the age of 19 to continue her studies. She graduated summa cum laude from Eastern Connecticut State University with a degree in communication and political science.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie also holds a master’s degree in creative writing from Johns Hopkins University and a master’s degree in African history from Yale University. She was awarded a Hodder Fellowship at Princeton University for the 2005-2006 academic year, and a fellowship at the Radcliffe Institute at Harvard University for the 2011-2012 academic year. In 2008, she was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s works have been translated into more than thirty languages. Her most recent work, “Notes On Grief,” an essay on the loss of her father, has just been published.
Her first novel, Purple Hibiscus (2003), won the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, and her second novel, Half of a Yellow Sun (2006), the Orange Prize. Her 2013 novel Americanah won the U.S. National Book Critics Circle Award and was named one of the ten best books of 2013 by The New York Times.
In 2014, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie published “We should all be feminists”, and in March 2017, “Dear Ijeawele or A Manifesto for a Feminist Education”, two essays in which she advocates for a feminist education that should be given from the earliest age.
Several honorary doctorates
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie has received honorary doctorates from Eastern Connecticut State University, Johns Hopkins University, Haverford College, Williams College, University of Edinburgh, Duke University, Amherst College, Bowdoin College, SOAS University of London, American University, Georgetown University, Yale University, Rhode Island School of Design and Northwestern University.
She has delivered two landmark TED talks: her 2009 TED talk The Danger of A Single Story and her 2012 TEDx Euston talk We Should All Be Feminists, which started a global conversation about feminism and was published as a book in 2014.
In 2015, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie was named by TIME magazine as one of the 100 most influential people in the world. In 2017, Fortune magazine named her one of the 50 greatest leaders in the world. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and, since October 2017, she is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences,
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie divides her time between the United States and Nigeria, where she leads an annual creative writing workshop.
Chimamanda is also a fashion and beauty icon and only wears outfits by African designers, in general and Nigerian designers, in particular, whose names she mentions in her social media posts.
