Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie moves through a nondescript hotel in London. We’re speaking over video call, and in the small frame captured by her phone camera, she appears typically glamorous in blue, with neat curls atop her head. She apologises for logging in late. She travelled to the UK this morning, to promote her fourth and most recent novel, Dream Count. (Those in the business are grandiosely calling it “a publishing event 10 years in the making”.) Usually, she lives outside Baltimore, in the US, though she also spends time in her native Nigeria.
“I’m just sort of stumbling from one interview to the other,” she explains, referring to the grind of the publicity trail. “I’m trying to keep myself coherent.”
She wants to know how to pronounce my name, and whether I speak Irish.
“I just kind of love that idea of reclaiming Irishness,” she says.
The idea of reclaiming cultures, in particular the Igbo culture of her heritage, is a thread that runs through Adichie’s life and work. The now 47-year-old grew up speaking Igbo and English, and in her 2018 speech “Igbo bụ Igbo”, she argued that “we make culture, and we can remake culture”, going on to attest to the value of language as a “conduit to culture”, and telling the audience that when her daughter was born, she made the conscious decision to speak only Igbo to her.
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Ideas of culture, oppression and self-definition, are also explored in Adichie’s novels, whether through a coming-of-age tale set during a military coup in Nigeria (Purple Hibiscus, 2003); a saga about the Biafran war (Half of a Yellow Sun, 2007); a story of a young woman who leaves Nigeria, and her childhood sweetheart, and emigrates to the US (Americanah, 2013); or most recently, a study of four West African women in a globalised world, grappling with the choices they have made and what it means to be known (Dream Count, 2025).
Her engaged and evocative work has placed Adichie as a central figure in the Nigerian, American and international canon, and made her one of the most celebrated writers on the planet.
“Hold on, I need to write that down. One of the most celebrated writers on the planet. I shall send this to all my family, and I’ll say a serious journalist said this,” she laughs.
Sometimes there’s something almost magical – something emotional – about being read widely that I discover only when I do events
She hardly needs me to tell her such a thing. Having published her first novel aged 26, Adichie has built a career that few in the literary world would dare to envision. Her 2009 Ted Talk, The Danger of a Single Story, which critiqued the tendency to default to a western outlook, established her as a kind of cultural luminary. This position was later cemented with her 2012 TEDx Talk, We Should All Be Feminists, which placed her at the centre of the zeitgeist, and captured the attention of Beyoncé, who used a sample of the talk in her 2013 single, Flawless, and the fashion brand Dior, which printed its title as a slogan on a T-shirt.
With a Wikipedia page as long as your arm, Adichie is the sort of figure who might appear in a high-profile make-up campaign one day, an interview with Michelle Obama the next, and pick up an honorary doctorate somewhere along the way.
“People close to me often tell me, ‘You don’t know who you are,’” she says. “Sometimes I’ll do an event, and someone will talk about how much my book has changed things for them. And then it turns out there’s also this book club that has done things with my book, and I’m just thinking, my goodness. Really? I mean, I know that I’m read widely. I know that, of course. But sometimes there’s something almost magical – something emotional – about being read widely that I discover only when I do events.”
At these events, online and in other public spheres, a kind of a fevered admiration swirls around Adichie. People buy tickets in their droves to see her speak, and clamour to contribute to audience Q & “The Queen Is Back!!!”, “if you write a dot (.) we would read it”, read some of the comments under the Instagram announcement of Dream Count. But such admiration must also beget pressure. Is there an expectation to be everything to all people, or to maintain a certain status as a public intellectual?
“Not really, no,” she says, matter-of-factly. “I think it’s because my central sense of self [is] as a writer. That’s really all I am – I’m a fiction writer. And all of the other things are peripheral. I mean, obviously, I choose to do them. I choose to talk about my opinion on certain things, and I always have. When I was growing up, my parents always let me talk, and made me feel that my opinion was interesting, even when they said it was wrong. And so, I think what I might call my participation in public discourse is simply a continuation of a little girl at the dinner table who was just talking.”
I don’t like that expression ‘writer’s block’, because I’m superstitious and it terrifies me
Adichie’s upbringing was an intellectual one: she grew up on the campus of the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, where her father was a professor of statistics, and her mother the first female registrar. Books have always been a part of her life, whether in the form of her father’s physics and chemistry texts, or the Enid Blyton novels she devoured as a youth. But when asked about her early exposure to storytelling, the first thing she recalls is: “listening to stories that my grandmother told when we would go visit her in my ancestral hometown”.
Writing was also a skill Adichie came to young. But despite being certain, from age five, that she was a writer, it was medicine she found herself enrolled in as a young adult.
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“I started to study medicine because I was expected to. Because if you do well in school, everyone tells you you have to be a doctor, and then you start to tell yourself that you have to be a doctor. I did that for a year, and I just one day realised how unbearably unhappy I would be if I continued.”
She left the course, which also meant leaving Nigeria since there was no way to redirect herself from the “science track” she had started upon, and relocated to the US, where upon first impression, she was taken aback by the excess.
“I remember going to a supermarket and thinking: ‘Why do we need so many varieties of cereal?’ Because I’d come from Nigeria, where it was cornflakes or oatmeal,” she says.
She was also struck by the “incredible focus on identity”.
“That’s when I suddenly became a black person,” she says. “That was surprising to me, that I became black, that I started to think of blackness as an identity, which I never had in Nigeria.”
She would go on to graduate with a degree in Communication and Political Science from Eastern Connecticut State University, and later a Master’s in Creative Writing from Johns Hopkins University, and a Master’s in African History from Yale.
She would also build a career out of her “vocation”, establishing herself as a budding talent with 2003’s Purple Hibiscus, and then exploding into literary stardom with 2007’s Half of A Yellow Sun, which won the Orange Prize (now The Women’s Prize), and was later adapted into a film starring Chiwetel Ejiofor.
Adichie’s latest novel, Dream Count, arrives after a 12-year hiatus of publishing fiction. Was there a reason for the long gestation?
“Well because I couldn’t write,” she says, frankly. “Sometimes you just cannot reach your ... ” – here, she reaches for a word that won’t come. “I don’t like that expression ‘writer’s block’, because I’m superstitious and it terrifies me, but I suppose that’s what it was.”
Nonetheless, the book must have been brewing in her subconscious. In 2011, a high-profile case took place that would inform one of its central threads. Nafissatou Diallo, a Guinean immigrant to New York, alleged that Dominique Strauss-Kahn, former chief of the International Monetary Fund, had attempted to rape her. The case, and the hypocrisies of the justice system (the expectation, for example, that victims of sexual assault be perfect in order to achieve justice) stayed with Adichie. Inspired by Diallo’s story, she created the fictional character of Kadiatou, who suffers a similar ordeal in the book.
“I did not plan to write about her in fiction at all,” Adichie says. “She’s different from me. She’s from Guinea, I’m from Nigeria. She’s Muslim, I’m Christian. She’s working class, I’m not. But I found her familiar and knowable, and therefore I felt this kind of protective affection for her.
“When her case was dropped, I felt very angry because I thought the US had let her down. Imagining her interior life […] became this way of showcasing the dignity of a person whose dignity had been ignored.”
In Adichie’s public life, the past number of years have been marked by turbulence. In a 2017 Channel 4 interview, her assertion that “trans women are trans women”, and that “if you’ve lived in the world as a man with the privileges that the world accords to men and then sort of change gender, it’s difficult for me to accept that we can equate your experience with the experience of a woman who has lived from the beginning as a woman”, was met with disappointment by those who had previously seen her as a beacon of intersectional feminism, and who felt that the privileges the world accords to men are not privileges accorded to trans women at any stage in their lives. Adichie subsequently issued a Facebook clarification, writing, “I have and will continue to stand up for the rights of transgender people,” but broadly maintaining the position she had previously held. The issue had not gone away by 2021, when she posted an essay online describing a falling out with two of her students which referenced the 2017 interview.
“I don’t have ... I’m so tired of that subject,” she says, with finality, when asked to comment on it.
Why is she tired of it?
“Well, because I am.”
There is a tense silence.
“I really resent this idea that somebody else will decide for me what I should spend my time thinking about. You know, I think there’s a sense in which it’s giving power to something that I don’t think is deserving of that power. But also, I mean, if I am going to say anything, it’s that I feel very strongly about thinking for myself. I do not like being told what to think. I think I’m fortunate to be blessed with the ability to think, and I want to use it.”
She feels that the reaction to women in public life can be quite different from the reaction to men in public life.
“And often the result is that women are cowed, and women don’t want to speak up. And I’m not going to ... you know, I will continue to say what I think. I will continue to think for myself.
I like to think that literature can show us ourselves in a way that’s slightly clearer than what we see when we look in the mirror
“I am a person who has always deeply believed in plurality – that diversity is a good thing, that different peoples of different kinds […] can live together. I’ve always believed that. That’s kind of a core thing for me. And it’s just interesting to then be labelled all sorts of things. And I sometimes think that when I’m asked about it […] it’s really just because there is a kind of longing for outrage and ugliness, and people just bring it up because there’s almost an excitement about the idea of somebody being publicly pilloried.”
The book, Dream Count, does not broach the topic of gender transition, but it does seem obliquely to concern itself with these ideas of which she speaks. One character, for example, finds herself taken aback by the “perfect righteous American liberals” she encounters at university in the US. “As long as you board their ideology train, your evilness will be overlooked,” she muses.
Early reviews of the book have been divided. Some have lauded its merits and tipped it as sure bet for this year’s Women’s Prize (it was announced earlier this week that it had made the longlist). Others, such as a recent review on vulture.com (the pop culture section of New York Magazine), have deemed it “a blandly regressive take on progressive Americans”.
Was it her intention, I ask, to satirise contemporary American approaches to discourse?
“It is a satire on contemporary US, yes,” she says. “I mean, it’s also kind of the world that I’ve known for a number of years. I’ve spent quite a bit of time in American universities, and it’s not limited to academic, but academia is kind of what I know, and it’s also what I care about. I grew up on a university campus, so academia is part of my, I mean, it’s my life. And so yes, you’re right. It is a satire.”
There is also, she says a “larger point” to this aspect of the novel.
“I like to think that literature can show us ourselves in a way that’s slightly clearer than what we see when we look in the mirror. And so, I think if anything, I’m asking the question: is this really how we want to be? I mean, parts of it are exaggerated, as they should be, because that’s kind of what satire does. But I think there’s this larger idea of asking if this is how we want to go about public discourse. And I’m hoping that the answer is no. This kind of sanctimony and self-righteousness and kind of being closed to new ideas that do not match your own is just not a good way to organise society.”
The book is dedicated to Adichie’s mother, Grace Ifeoma Adichie (née Odigwe), who died suddenly in 2021. Adichie’s father, James Nwoye Adichie, had died a year previously, an experience she recounted in her 2021 memoir, Notes on Grief. Dream Count, while on the surface a novel about the “interlinked desires of four women”, is, Adichie tells us in the afterword, “really about my mother. About losing my mother. A grief still stubbornly in infancy”.
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“When I started writing this novel, I wasn’t at all consciously thinking about my mother, really, in terms of the book,” she says. “And I also wasn’t thinking about writing about mothers and daughters. I wanted to write a book about women’s lives. But when I went back and reread what I had when I was close to finishing, I was struck by how much of it was about not merely women’s lives but mothers and daughters.”
She says she felt the “emotional presence” of her mother, when writing.
“That’s the only way I can describe it. I felt that my mother had, in some ways, opened the door for me to get back to fiction.”
Adichie herself is a mother to a nine-year-old daughter, and most recently, to twin boys, who arrived 10 months ago, and whose existence she kept largely under wraps from the public. How did she manage that?
She laughs. “My babies were actually born by surrogate. But in those early months I’m falling in love. And there’s something that’s just so precious about it that you just do not want it to be knowledge owned by people who do not know you.”
She adds that “they’re still not sleeping through the night”.
Is Adichie, then, finding time to work on her next novel?
“If I was, I would not tell you,” she says, cryptically.
But she confirms that she would like to write another children’s book, having published the picture book, Mama’s Sleeping Scarf, in 2023.
When it comes to her writing practice, she says it’s different for each book.
“But what I can say is that when I’m in it, when I’m finally able to get into an emotional writing space, I am almost obsessive. It’s the only thing that I want to do and want to think about. And sometimes I’m terrified of going to sleep, because I think that when I wake up, it’ll be gone.”
Dream Count by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is published by Fourth Estate.
