An award winning Nigerian writer, Chimamanda
Ngozi Adichie has been shortlisted for the Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction.
The author of Half of a Yellow Sun, a novel
that won a prize in 2007, was shortlisted for Americanah alongside other
writers such as: Donna Tartt, for The Goldfinch, first-time novelists Hannah
Kent, for Burial Rites; Audrey Magee, for The Undertaking; and Eimear McBride
for A Girl Is A Half-formed Thing.
Criteria for selection comprise: “Any woman
writing in English - whatever her nationality, country of residence, age or
subject matter - is eligible. The literary prize was funded privately in 2013
with liqueur company Baileys announced as the new sponsor in June. This year's
winner will be announced at London's Royal Festival Hall on June 4. The
shortlist, announced in central London on Monday night, features two Irish
authors - Magee and McBride. Tartt is American, Kent is Australian and
London-born Lahiri grew up in the US where she now lives. Tartt was shortlisted
in 2003 for The Little Friend while Adichie was shortlisted the following year
for Purple Hibiscus,” the organisers stated.
Describing her development as a writer, between her books
Purple Hibiscus, Half of a Yellow Sun and Americanah, Adichie says ‘they
are such different books, and I think I wrote them from very different places
in my life, emotionally.’
According to her ‘For Purple Hibiscus, I was very
homesick, I was in the US. Suddenly I was romanticizing the hibiscus flowers in
our front yard and I wrote this book, about missing home, nostalgia. Half of a
Yellow Sun was so different. I knew I was writing about this very intense,
contested history and I did so much research, and I cried a lot when I was
writing it. My grandfathers died in Biafra, and here I was kind of mining the
pain of my family.’
‘Then Americanah, I laughed a lot writing it. It's
just very different, I don't so much see it as a kind of linear progression -
the books. It's sort of more just like occupying different parallel spaces,’
Adichie explained. Americanah won the US
National Critics Book Prize last month.
US author, AM Homes, beat the double
Booker-winning author Hilary Mantel with her satire May We Be Forgiven last
year to win Baileys Women's Prize.
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