Born in the town of Enugu she grew up in the university town of Nsukka in south-eastern Nigeria where the University of Nigeria is situated. At the age of 19, she left Nigeria and moved to the United States. After studying at Drexel University in Philadelphia, Chimamanda transferred to Eastern Connecticut State University to live closer to her sister; who had a medical practice in Coventry (now in Mansfield, Connecticut), and to continue studying communications and political science. She received a university degree from Eastern, where she graduated summa cum laude in 2001. In 2003, she completed a master's degree in creative writing at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. In 2008, she received a Master of Arts in African studies at Yale University.
Chimamanda is a 2008 MacArthur Fellow. She was a Visiting Writer at Wesleyan University, in 2008, and participated in Wesleyan's Distinguished Writers Series.
Her first novel, Purple Hibiscus, was published in 2003 and won the Best First Book award in the 2005 Commonwealth Writers' Prize.
Her second novel, Half of a Yellow Sun, named after the flag of the short-lived Biafran nation, is set before and during the Biafran War. It was published by Knopf/Anchor in 2006 and was awarded the 2007 Orange Prize for Fiction.
Her third book is a collection of short stories titled The Thing Around Your Neck and was published in April 2009 by Fourth Estate in the UK and Knopf in the US.
