The best 15 top moments of the book that started it all.
October 2003: Chimamanda’s Purple Hibiscus Published in the U.S. by Algonquin Books
Founded in 1983 by American literary critic and writing teacher Louis D. Rubin, the New York-based publishing house began small. “I realized I didn’t just want to put people into print,” Rubin told the Los Angeles Times in 1989. “I wanted to launch them.” They stayed true to their mission when they acquired a manuscript by an unknown Nigerian writer from Pearson Morris & Belt Literary Management, and the 307-page book took off on its own, slowly but surely, through that most efficacious of publicities: word-of-mouth. Purple Hibiscus was published in the U.K. by Fourth Estate on 1 March 2004, and Chimamanda then signed with the Wylie Agency’s Sarah Chalfant.
January 2004: The Washington Post Calls Her “The 21st Century Daughter of…Chinua Achebe”
In a 2004 review for The Washington Post, Yale University lecturer Bill Broun offered the tag that connected the most with the literary world. “Adichie is at her best in giving the traumatized Kambili a playful individual dignity that challenges the humorless power-mongering of her father and her country’s dictators,” he writes. “As Adichie later suggests, however, political truth has limitations. In this thinking, she is very much the 21st-century daughter of that other great Igbo novelist, Chinua Achebe.”
April 2004: Shortlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction
July 2004: First Book Event in Nigeria
August 2004: Longlisted for the Man Booker Prize
October 2004: Wins the Hurston-Wright Legacy Award
April 2005: PEN World Voices Festival Conversation with Michael Ondaatje
April 2005: Wins Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best First Book
November 2005: Shortlisted for the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize
August 2006: Reaction to Chinua Achebe Liking the Novel
2011-2015: Inclusion in WAEC Syllabus
November 2013: Recounts Publication Struggle During “Kwani? at 10” Lecture
November 2014: Fourth Estate’s “30 from 30” Tribute
April 2017: “One Book, One Maryland” Win
September 2018: Novel Gains New Life as Purple Hibiscus Trust Workshop
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