Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie wins Baileys 'Best of the Best'

Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's novel Half of a Yellow Sun has won the Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction's ‘Best of the Best’ award, deemed to be the finest winner from the award’s second decade.

Feature by Alan Bett | 03 Nov 2015

Muriel Gray, Chair of the judges when Half of a Yellow Sun won the Baileys Prize in 2007, said: “While it’s sometimes pompous to call a book ‘important’, it’s appropriate to say it of Half of a Yellow Sun.”

“For an author, so young at the time of writing, to have been able to tell a tale of such enormous scale in terms of human suffering and the consequences of hatred and division, whilst also gripping the reader with wholly convincing characters and spell binding plot, is an astonishing feat.

"Chimamanda’s achievement makes Half of a Yellow Sun not just a worthy winner of this most special of prizes, but a benchmark for excellence in fiction writing.”

The operatic 2007 novel tells the story of the Nigerian civil war of 1967-70 from the multiple perspectives of those living within the breakaway region of Biafra.

In accepting the prize, Ngozi Adichie stated that it was ‘really an honour’ and then jokingly ‘wonderful for my ego.’ The author follows in the footsteps of Andrea Levy who was named winner of ‘Best of the Best’ of the Prize’s first decade for her novel Small Island, which won the Women’s Prize in 2004.

The novel was adapted for the screen in 2014 by the Nigerian director Biyi Bandele, who spoke to The Skinny last year to explain the difficulties in filming such an epic work. Describing his process in adapting the novel, Bandele said: "A movie has more in common with a short story than a novel.

"If you’re going to make a completely literally faithful adaptation of a novel you shouldn’t make a movie, you should make a TV series – I’ve distilled it to its essence.” 


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http://www.womensprizeforfiction.co.uk/