Raised in Nsukka, Nigeria in the house in which the Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe had also lived, Chimamanda studied Medicine and Pharmacology in University, until she immigrated to the United States where she obtained a Bachelors in Communication and Political Science at the University of Connecticut, then a Masters in Creative Writing as well as African Studies. After her debut novel Purple Hibiscus in 2003, winning the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize and the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, in 2007 she came to the attention of the literary world upon winning the Orange Prize with her novel Half of A Yellow Sun, a multicolored fresco of 1960’s Nigeria set during the Biafran War. This book won her the 2009 International Nonino Prize. Her style represents an admirable synthesis, at times surprising, of African oral tradition and the quality of the modern American novel.