Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie grew up in Nigeria. Her work has been translated into thirty languages. Her first novel, "Purple Hibiscus", published by Algonquin in 2003, won the Commonwealth Writers' Prize and the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award. Her novel "Half of a Yellow Sun" won the Orange Broadband Prize and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Her story collection, "The Thing Around Your Neck", was the winner of the Dayton Literary Peace Prize. A recipient of a 2008 MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, she divides her time between the United States and Nigeria.