The Writer as Two Selves: Reflections on the Private Act of Writing and the Public Act of Citizenship
October 20, 2010. Spencer Trask Lecture

Born in Nigeria, novelist Chimamanda Adichie is the author of Purple Hibiscus (2003), which was nominated for a Booker Prize, and Half of a Yellow Sun (2006), which won the 2007 Orange Prize for Fiction and revolves around the Biafran war of 1967-70.  She has recently published a collection of short stories titled The Thing around Your Neck (2009). She was a MacArthur fellow in 2008. She has been a visiting writer at Wesleyan University and at Princeton University, where she was a Hodder fellow.