Ngozi Adichie wins American Book Award

Accolades and awards are now becoming synonymous with the brainy and seasoned writer, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. The American intellectual  group, National Book Critics Circle has announced yesterday evening that Adichie won the National Book Critics Circle prize for fiction on her latest novel Americanah.

Even before  the arrival of her the  novel, Americanah which is a well received fiction that traced, explored and unravel the enigma of American race relation, sociology intermingled with presence of recent immigrant from Africa, Adichie has already become a household name in the literary world.

Adichie is the first African in the history of  National Book Critics Circle prize to win the prestigious American award. Adichie is a first rate intellectual with a superior mind. Her ability to mingle abstraction and reality in-order to conjure a relevant and pragmatic novel is mind boggling.  This buttress her act of  ingenuity and intellectuality that has  resonated with millions of adoring fans and readers.

New York Times reported that “Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Sheri Fink were among the winners of the National Book Critics Circle Awards, named Thursday night in New York City. The awards, given annually to books published in the United States in English, are chosen by a group of nearly 600 critics and editors from major publications that cover books.

Ms. Adichie’s novel, “Americanah” (Knopf), about a young woman who leaves Nigeria to pursue a college education in the United States, has been praised for its incisive discussion of race, immigration and social dynamics. Ms. Fink, who is a reporter for The New York Times, won for “Five Days at Memorial: Life and Death in a Storm-Ravaged Hospital” (Crown), a nonfiction account of the catastrophe at a New Orleans hospital during Hurricane Katrina.

The other winners were Amy Wilentz for “Farewell, Fred Voodoo” (Simon & Schuster), in autobiography; Leo Damrosch for “Jonathan Swift” (Yale University Press), in biography; Franco Moretti for “Distant Reading” (Verso), in criticism; and Frank Bidart for “Metaphysical Dog” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux) in poetry. “

In explaining her motivation and understanding of American racial web, Ngozi Adichie said, “I feel as though being African, I can laugh at certain things that maybe if I were African American I wouldn’t,” she said. “I don’t know race in the way an African American knows race… Sometimes it takes an outsider to see something about your own reality that you don’t.”

One of her novels, Half of a yellow Sun has been made into a movie with A- list actors including the Academy nominee and BAFT winner Chiwetelu Ejiofor, Geneva Nnaji, Thandie Newton and many others. The movie will be released for world wide this summer that focused on love relation that took place during Biafra Civil war. Millions of Igbo people  were perished in the war and it was the first documented genocide in Africa.

The National Book Critics Circle (NBCC) was established in 1974 to highlight books published in United States of America  and it has around 600 members.