Adichie was born into an Igbo family in Enugu, Nigeria, in 1977. She grew up in the house formerly occupied by the internationally-renowned Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe. Her father was a professor at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, and her mother was the university’s first female Registrar. At the age of 19, Adichie left Nigeria for the US to pursue her degrees in Communication, Political Science, and Creative Writing. She received numerous honorary doctorate degrees from both American and African universities.

Adichie’s literary works are difficult to classify due to their hybridized genre style. Although Adichie’s fiction often features Igbo and/or Nigerian women exploring their identities through their relationships with the world around them, Adichie’s use of nonlinear framing and exposition frequently leads to her works being classified as social commentaries on the topics of gender, race and/or sexuality. Due to the multi-faceted textuality of her works where, for example, a love story becomes a social critique of the permanent in-betweenness of Black migrants leaving and returning to their homelands (e.g., Americanah), scholars and critics alike have referred to Adichie as an Afropolitan, realist writer.