Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and her editor Robin Desser at the NBCC Awards after AMERICANAH won best Fiction.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's first novel was longlisted
for the Man Booker prize; her second, Half of a Yellow Sun, won the Orange
prize. Now her third, the acclaimed Americanah, has beaten Donna Tartt's The
Goldfinch to win the Nigerian author one of most prestigious literary prizes in
the US, the National Book Critics Circle (NBCC) award.
Americanah, which has also just been longlisted for
the Baileys women's fiction prize, alongside titles by Evie Wyld, Elizabeth
Gilbert and Booker-winner Eleanor Catton, had previously found favour among US
book reviewers. The New York Times called it "witheringly trenchant and
hugely empathetic, both worldly and geographically precise, a novel that holds
the discomfiting realities of our times fearlessly before us", and the
Washington Post said it contained "a ruthless honesty about the ugly and beautiful
sides" of the United States and Nigeria.
www.theguardian.com
