Before Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie became one of the most recognised writers of her generation, she was a young writer sending her manuscript to publishers and collecting rejection letters.
Adichie grew up on the University of Nigeria campus in Nsukka, where her parents both worked. Her father, James Nwoye Adichie, was Nigeria’s first professor of statistics and later became the university’s Deputy Vice Chancellor. Her mother, Grace Ifeoma Adichie, was the first woman to serve as the university’s registrar. Books were a constant presence in the family, and Adichie began reading widely as a child. By the age of ten, she had read most of the English children’s books she could find, many of them stories about white children playing in snow and eating apples. Then she read Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart. For the first time, she saw African characters at the centre of a story, rather than somewhere in the background, and it was an important moment in her own journey towards becoming a writer.
She initially studied medicine and pharmacy at the University of Nigeria, spending about a year and a half there and editing a Catholic medical students’ magazine, The Compass. She however eventually realised medicine was not what she wanted to do. So, at nineteen, she left Nigeria on a scholarship to study communication at Drexel University in Philadelphia. She then later transferred to Eastern Connecticut State University, where she studied communication and political science and graduated summa cum laude.
During those years, Adichie lived with her older sister, Ijeoma, and helped care for her nephew while completing her studies. It was also during her time at Eastern Connecticut that she began writing her first novel and by her senior year, she was working on what would become Purple Hibiscus.
When she finished the manuscript, she believed she had a book worth publishing. She used The Writer’s Marketplace to look for literary agents and followed the advice of sending her manuscript to several agents at a time, but the responses were not what she expected.
One rejection became several, then several more. Eventually, she had been rejected 25 times. At one point, an agent told her that the writing was strong but suggested moving the story out of Nigeria and setting it in America instead. For Adichie, that would have meant changing a central part of the story to make it easier for publishers to understand and sell, and she did not want to do that. So, she just kept sending her manuscript out.
Eventually, Diana Pearson Morris of Pearson Morris & Belt Literary Management read Purple Hibiscus and agreed to represent her. Still, getting an agent did not immediately make the book an easy sell. Publishers struggled to figure out where Adichie fitted within the categories they used to market Black women writers. She was Nigerian, not African American or Caribbean, and there was no obvious place for her on the shelves they already had. Then Algonquin Books, a small independent publisher based in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, took a chance on the novel and Purple Hibiscus was published on October 30, 2003.
The book went on to win the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best First Book and the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award. It was also shortlisted for the Orange Prize and longlisted for the Booker Prize.
The young writer who had once received 25 rejections had finally found a publisher. Purple Hibiscus became the beginning of a career that would include Half of a Yellow Sun, Americanah and the TED Talk that introduced her ideas about feminism and identity to millions of people around the world.
