Harvard University to honour Chimamanda with W.E.B Du Bois medal

Award-winning Nigerian writer, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, will receive Harvard University’s W.E.B. Du Bois Medal on October 6, 2022. Chimamanda was the Harvard College Class Day Speaker in 2018 and was previously a Harvard Radcliffe Institute Fellow (2011-2012).

On Monday, the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research announced in The Harvard Gazette that Chimamanda and six others will receive the medal as people “who embody the values of commitment and resolve that are fundamental to the Black experience in America.”

The W.E.B. Du Bois medal is the highest honour given by Harvard in the field of African and African American studies. The award comes nearly three years after it had been halted at the onset of the pandemic. Past recipients include Oprah Winfrey, Maya Angelou, Muhammad Ali, Steven Spielberg, Ava Duvernay and Chinua Achebe.

Others to receive the honours include basketball legend Kareem Abdul-Jabbar; actress Laverne Cox; philanthropist and patron of the arts and education Agnes Gund; businessman Raymond J. McGuire; former Massachusetts governor, Deval Patrick and artist and visual storyteller Betye Saar.

In 2018, Chimamanda was awarded the PEN Pinter Prize, named after Nobel Laureate Harold Pinter, given annually to a writer of “outstanding literary merit who shows a fierce intellectual determination.” The award was jointly shared with imprisoned Saudi lawyer and human rights activist Waleed Abulkhair.

Chimamanda has received 16 honorary doctorate degrees from some of the world’s leading universities, is a member of both the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Her first novel, Purple Hibiscus (2003), won the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize. Her second, Half of a Yellow Sun (2006), won the Orange Prize for Fiction (subsequently the Bailey’s Prize, and now the Women’s Prize for Fiction). Her third novel, Americanah (2013), won the US National Book Critics Circle Award and was named one of the New York Times Top 10 Best Books of the year.