"words don´t come easy": she is a writer

Chimamanda Nogozi Adichie was born Nigeria in 1977. She has received numerous awards and distinctions, including The Orange Broadband Prize For Fiction in 2007, and a Mc Arthur Foundation fellowship in 2008.

Stairway to the stars

Chimamanda said that books enlarge imagination and that we should see human stories behind stories. This great author lived in a country that used to be an English colony, so, when she was a child she read English stories about white characters and their customs which were very different from Chimamanda´s background. She grew up under a represive and military regimen where African books were not so available, so as she was fond of writing she began to write about the only thing she had read, English stories. After that, when she was 19 years old she went to the university, in America. There, she realized that people like her could exist in literature, not only there were English writers in the world and that when we read as children we are affected by stories. Being in America Chimamda had a roommate who had heard about Africa as a catastrophic country, but that was the single story, not the complete one. The writer said that stories could break and repair dignity so as ecnomic and cultural power could make people believe only the part that powerful people desire. Chimamanda named some things that affected people in Africa under colonialism, such as, the loss of dignity, of the ancestors land, the language, the story and the way of think. She said that when we write we must think about people and their stories. Once, she was asked about the reasons of being a writer and she answered that she wanted to take all mankind with her in a stairway to the stars.