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Sydney Writers' Festival 2009 - Online Program

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Opening Address presented by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
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One of the most applauded new voices in fiction, Nigerian writer and Orange Prize-winner Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie presents the 2009 Opening Address. A young writer already acquiring prodigious literary celebrity, Adichie illuminates the complexities of human experience inspired by events in her native Nigeria.

Best-known for her epic novel about the Biafran war, Half of a Yellow Sun - winner of the 2007 Orange Prize for Fiction - she has just won one of the 2008 MacArthur Foundation fellowship awards (popularly known as the ‘genius grants’) worth 500,000 US dollars.

Chimamanda Adichie’s novels include Purple Hibiscus and Half of a Yellow Sun. Her short stories have appeared in such publications as the New Yorker, Granta, and the Virginia Quarterly Review. Her new work is a collection of stories, The Thing Around Your Neck.

Lecture  |  Nonfiction, Fiction
Participants
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Sandra Yates AO (facilitator)

When
Wednesday, May 20 2009
18:30 - 20:00

Where
Sydney Theatre at Walsh Bay
22 Hickson Road
Walsh Bay
 Venue and Transport Info

Cost
$35/$25

Bookings
9250 1988
 Sydney Theatre Box Office

Schedule
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SANDRA YATES AO (LOCAL)
Sandra Yates AO joined the board of Sydney Writers’ Festival in 1999 and has been Chair since 2000. She is a former chair of Saatchi & Saatchi Australia and the NSW TAFE Commission Board, and is currently Chair of Books Alive.

also appearing at...
117: Sonya Hartnett in Conversation with Sandra Yates
214: Celebrity Chefs Exposed
203: Nocturnes: Kazuo Ishiguro in Conversation via video link

CHIMAMANDA NGOZI ADICHIE (INTERNATIONAL)Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi by Beowulf Sheehan

CHIMAMANDA NGOZI ADICHIE grew up in Nigeria. She holds a Masters degree in Creative Writing from Johns Hopkins and a Masters degree in African Studies from Yale. Her first novel, Purple Hibiscus, won the Commonwealth Writers' Prize and the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award. It was shortlisted for the Orange Prize and the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize, and longlisted for the Booker Prize. Her second novel, Half of a Yellow Sun, won the 2007 Orange Prize for Fiction. Her work has been translated into 30 languages. She was a 2005-2006 Hodder Fellow at Princeton, where she taught introductory fiction. She divides her time between the United States and Nigeria. Her new collection is The Thing Around Your Neck.

Her participation is supported by HarperCollins Publishers.


 halfofayellowsun.com

also appearing at...
94: The Long and Short of It
142: First Tuesday Book Club
247: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie in Conversation with Ramona Koval
272: International Voices