Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie on inspiration, feminism and being your 'Winner of Winners'

[Music] good evening ladies and gentlemen and what a list of books that is um welcome to this one-off unique event to celebrate our winner your winner of winners uh part of 25 years of the women's prize for fiction uh when we set up the prize our aim was to honor and amplify and celebrate extraordinary and diverse writing by women from all over the world and to put the classics of tomorrow in the hands of readers of today when you can see from that list but what a library it is but we've had 45 million people globally engaging with our reading women campaign during this strange year shall we say um we've done reading guides for all of the previous 25 winners which you can find on our website and also link to the podcast to hear new readers talking about some of the books from way back at the beginning of our our journey right up the present day but many many many of you voted and the book that you voted as your winner of winners is chimamanda nagotti adichie's half of the yellow sun which was our 2007 winner so tonight we're here to celebrate that extraordinary book um we've got an amazing evening lined up for you first of all uh we're going to hear a reading from google map raw from half of yellow sun and then after that we're going to uh listen to chimamanda negotiated herself talking to us from her house in lagos and then there will be an event and a q a and a discussion with ryola aye in lagos um i'm in sussex in england and i can see that there are thousands of you joining us and you're saying where you come from all over the world and you are very very welcome and we'd like to thank you all for your engagement uh with the reading women campaign which we've been so proud of during the course of this year for those of you who would like um some support claire edwards our wonderful bsl interpreter is on the screen if you need a little bit more to see claire a bit more clearly if you go to the chat button you'll be able to see how to get a slightly bigger image which i hope will help but i'm going to be back at the end i can't wait to hear what's going to happen um but for now i'm going to hand over to google mubarak raw to read from your winner off of yellowstone 2007. here you go enjoy the evening and see you later alana was sitting on muhammad's veranda drinking chilled rice milk laughing at the delicious cold trickle down her throat at the stickiness on her lips when the gateman appeared and asked to speak to muhammad mohammed left and came back moments later holding what looked like a pamphlet they're rioting he said it's the students isn't it alana asked i think it's religious you must leave right away his eyes avoided hers muhammad calm down sulei said they are blocking the roads and searching for infidels come come he was already heading indoors molana followed he worried too much did muhammad muslim students were always demonstrating about one thing or other after all and harassing people who were wealth he worried too much did muhammad muslim students were always demonstrating about one thing or other after all and harassing people who were west and dressed but they always dispersed quickly enough muhammad went into a room and came out with a long scarf wear this so you can blend in he said alana placed it over her head and wound it round her neck i looked like a proper muslim woman she joked but mohammed barely smiled let's go i know a shortcut to the train station train station arize and i are not leaving until tomorrow mohammed malana said she almost ran to keep up with him i'm going back to my uncle's house in sabon gary olana mohammed started the car it jerked as he took off sabongale is not safe what do you mean she tugged at the scarf the embroidery at the edges felt coarse and uncomfortable against her neck sulei said they are well organized alana stared at him suddenly frightened at how frightened he looked muhammad his voice was low he said evil bodies are lying on airport road alana realized then that this was not just another demonstration by religious students fear parched her throat she clasped her hands together please let us pick up my people first she said please muhammad headed towards sabongare a bus drove past dusty and yellow it looked like one of those campaign buses that politicians used to tour rural areas and give out rice and cash to villagers a man was hanging out of the door a loud speaker pressed to his mouth his slow house of words resonating the evil must go the infidels must go the evil must go muhammad reached out and squeezed her hand and held onto it as they drove past a crowd of young men on the roadside chanting he slowed down and blew the horn a few times in solidarity they waved and he picked up speed again in zabon the first street was empty alana saw the smoke rising like tall grey shadows before she smelled the scent of burning stay here mohammed said as he stopped the car outside uncle maisie's compound she watched him run out the street looked strange unfamiliar the compound gate was broken the metal flattened on the ground then she noticed auntie efika's kiosk or what remained of it splinters of wood packets of groundnuts lying in the dust she opened the car door and climbed out she paused for a moment because of how glaringly bright and hot it was with flames billowing from the roof with grit and ash floating in the air before she began to run towards the house she stopped when she saw the bodies so we are filming in my home in my lagos home i i happen to have two homes so this is my lagos home for me lagos is where i come to be closer to family and friends and have a life um the us is where i go to have quiet and and not have a life and in general i think i i write when i can so it's not often about where i am it's more about the mental and emotional space that i'm in and i find that when i'm in nigeria i'm taking notes i'm watching i'm observing and i'm not necessarily writing about those notes and then when i go to the us i have a bit of distance and i think that's when i can turn my observations into art are there objects that have inspired my writing in this space yes i i think i get my inspiration really from more from from events rather than things but if i had to talk about things that inspire me i think i would talk about art i have paintings here that just make me happy i'm i'm very moved by art and i like the idea of different forms of of art speaking to one another so i like the idea of art sort of painting speaking to literature and so i have paintings here um all done by nigerians which is also important to me that just make me happy and so put me in a more creative space my nigerianness is important to me as well i think nigeria is a very complicated complex country that often for me is a source of frustration but also is a country that i cannot help but love some parts of it and lagos which has become my home is such an interesting and equally frustrating city there's so many stories in the city that haven't been told and there's something about it that just feeds my imagination so i love being here i have friends our family here and also my ancestral hometown in anambra state is is very close to my heart it's also home and i spend time there so i think my nigerian-ness which again is an identity i did not choose but it's it's it's central to who i am i started writing half of the yellow sun and i'm going to say 2000 and maybe 2001 even though it didn't it wasn't published until 2006 but i also feel as though i've had that book in me for so many years i grew up in the shadow of biafra my parents lost everything they owned in the war my grandfathers died in that war both of them in refugee camps um and and i feel as though when i was growing up it was it was a shadow hanging there that i didn't really understand but my family's history was divided so that was before the war and there was after the war and i was born seven years after the war ended the war ended in 1970 i was born in 1977 but i always felt that the war was present but at the same time in some ways it was a presence that was absent nobody really talked about it but it was there so my parents would you know say things like before the war so and so so you knew that something really catastrophic had happened and as a teenager i started asking questions i started reading about it and so i think i've been preparing for this book for a long time and i like to say that my grandfather's i really believe this that my grandfather's wanted me to write the story and for me in a way it i wish i had known my grandfathers they sound like really lovely men and so for me this is the thing that took them and i wanted to understand this thing that took them this is the thing that i think made my father and his generation lose their sense of innocence and their sense of hope about nigeria and i wanted to understand that and so when i was writing the novel i did so much research i um i read everything i could find i looked at archives i looked at archives in london i looked at archives at yale i looked at archives wherever i could look at archives i listened to radio broadcast from that period i watched video clips i really immersed myself in that in that period but actually the thing that that so i like to say that i read books to get the facts but i talk to people to get the truths and i talk to everyone i mean i think i became a nuisance to my father's friends because i would say you know uncle good afternoon where were you in may of 1968 right and they would be like what kind of crazy child is this but but also they indulged me and they answered my questions but the person who really made this book possible is my father my father talked to me about his experiences endlessly i would hear stories from other people and i would ask my father do you remember you know what do you remember of this and he would give me more context and more um and just more details and my father made this book possible and so in some ways for me as well winning this winner of winners this year the year that i lost my father the most important man in my life there's something bittersweet about it because when i first heard the first thing i wanted to do was call my dad and tell him so when i i won the the prize in 2007 for half of a yellow sun but actually before that my first novel purple hibiscus had been shortlisted for the prize didn't win but i think that was actually the thing that brought for me a mainstream audience being shortlisted for the prize and then of course then winning it with my next novel was kind of um you know it felt like it felt like it felt like a gift that's what it felt like it felt like a gift and i really do think that this is the prize that brought me not just an audience but brought me a kind of again the gift of being taken seriously i think as a writer what one wants is to be read and to be taken seriously and i think this is what the surprise did for me it it brought my book an audience it made people pay attention and i also had on the short list the year that i won books that i really admired and i mean obviously i was very happy to win but i was also happy to be on the short list with these just really remarkable writers that was just a most wonderful film to listen to a writer so extraordinary and so magnificent as chimamanda negotiated talking about how long sometimes a novel takes suggest and get ready and find its voice but i loved uh that she said it was something about prizes was the gift of being taken seriously because what we wanted when we were setting up the women's surprise for fiction was not just to make sure that exceptional beautiful exquisite life-changing work by women got into the hands of readers who would love it but but also the idea of honoring that work and seeing a diverse range of voices as being part of what literature is that literature is not one type of writing it is all the voices and all of us as readers are the richer uh for the wider range of novels that we can we can engage with because sometimes we read of course to have our own experiences reflected back at us sometimes we read to stand in other people's shoes but sometimes we read to dream about worlds that are so far from our own experiences and i think listening to a novelist so great as chimamanda i got to adichie speaking about that and you will see behind me i have my own faithful original copy of half of the yellow sun there is a beautiful new edition available but that is the one that when the book first came out and was first shaw's visited and then one uh was there um while we're just waiting for uh for jola and tim amanda to be mic'd up live in lagos um i just wanted to also say about the women's prize for fiction that it's not only about us as readers it's also about you as writers and i can see that we have writers from all over the world and many of you are based in the uk what we have done every year with the women's prize for fiction is to try to if you like do a cradle to grave um so it's about all of the writers who sometimes don't see themselves reflected on the jackets of a book but who should be writing their own stories too and every year of the prize we've had an education initiative a research initiative um an engagement initiative our diversity initiative to try to make sure that a wider range of potential writers feel that they have the right to tell their own stories and this year we are doing with nat west and curtis brown the literary agency an enormous program called discoveries where we're hoping to encourage people of all ages from all backgrounds all over the uk to engage with us and to start their own writing journey none of us and i speak from my own experience none of us starts writing thinking we can do it no none of us particularly women feel that their story deserves to be heard in quite the same sort of way with all the bells and whistles but the only way to start our own writing journey is to just sit down and do it and i hope that everybody listening to chimamanda speaking then about how long her novel half of the yellow sun took to just state and to find its voice will take comfort in that so any of you in the uk who are writing who are thinking about writing do go to our website and see about discoveries you don't have to have a finished book but part of that will be a mentoring program because it is very important that everybody who loves reading and all of us who are also writers um you know just make sure that we get a bigger table and more chairs so that we can listen to extraordinary writers and who knows there could be somebody listening tonight who will be the winner of the women's prize when we have our 50th anniversary i'm delighted to say that uh jola and chimamanda are now mic'ed up and ready to go live in lagos so enjoy this next bit do post in your questions we'll get through as many as we can and again i'll see you at the end congratulations congratulations um i have been an avid fan of your work and i'm very very happy and proud of you proud of you so it's been 25 years of the women's prize for fiction and in an industry where many women have fought for and continue to fight for validation and it's reported that male authors still sell more books um than women do what does it mean to you to have this sort of space where women's writing is celebrated and highlighted it means the walls to me no i want to i want to first of all say how happy i am to be here thank you thank you so much kate moss you're you're a star because you started this and i think it's easy to complain about how women are excluded but then to actually decide to do something about it which is what kids did so um no i i really mean it and i think it's very common for people to say i was so honored and humbled right so sometimes it starts to not have any meaning but i really really um this means a lot to me in particular and i've been fortunate to get prizes and it never gets old right it's just always nice to be validated if people tell you that they don't care they're lying okay but with this one in particular i feel as though the orange prize gave me and it was called the orange prize when i won i feel as though it gave me um it introduced me to the world so my first novel was shortlisted for behind discuss that's actually how i think i started to get a mainstream leadership so i so to then become winner winners is um it just felt really nice and good but i should also say there's so many writers on that that who have won over the years that i i love and respect and so i just sort of feel like i'm a very good company you are women can we talk about how men sell more yes please men sell more because men are promoted better men don't sell more because they're necessarily better writers men sell more because they they have more space they they are reviewed more they uh because for so long literature was male and so there's a sense and we're just like in i think everything in the world where we really still have a long way to go before we reach any kind of um parity so i guess my point is that it's not it's not remarkable that men sell more it's not because men are better i think talent is divided equally among the sexes well i kind of think women are better but you see this way i know i don't think so i think women are human fair okay um so in all of your work which hybrid you highlight different bonds between women that offer strength so cambilia and anti-forma olana and her twin sister zakura and miliaku there's a way that you kind of create these bonds that are very very strong and important to the characters they offer social strength and i absolutely absolutely adore it it's a thing of mine at the moment women celebrating relationships between women as much as the kind of phone of our romantic relationships i have a big thing about that at the moment and i wanted to ask you if that's something you did deliberately um kind of highlighting these deeper and sometimes complex relationships so it's actually something that as you were writing revealed itself um i you know i'm actually thinking about it yes yeah right no i don't think and the thing about my writing process is i it's you know like i say this often that i do these things and i make up answers to questions when i'm sitting down writing that for me the creative process is it's a lot of intuition and mystery really and sort of just listening to my ancestors speaking to me then it is a kind of plan okay but i think i think surely there is i mean my life is one in which female bonds are essential i i wouldn't be the person i am if i didn't have the kind of support i have from the women in my life yeah and so i guess there is a thing where you know i guess one reflects what one knows so so i also feel you know what you said about romantic relationships are wonderful and of course romantic relationships can exist between women but just platonic solid bonds between women it's really important to me and i sometimes feel that we live in a culture that gives too much power and energy and just sort of emotional space to romantic relationships and i think women sometimes expect everything to come from the romantic partner yeah and i feel as though we really should make space for you know getting different kinds of support from from friends i certainly i mean honestly i would not be here if i didn't have i mean the reason that i'm the person i am in the world is not just because i have a fantastic family and and really i had the best father in the world i'm sure you might want to argue with that best because i know you have a fantastic father but it's also because of the women in my life i have them very close friends my cousins my sister-in-law they just i you know they're the ones i call they just have my back yeah and i have theirs and they get it yes um so half of the yellow sun the book you won your winner of winners prize for it's not just like this wonderful work of fiction but it's rooted in history um the biafra which happened between 1967 and 1970. do you feel that writers and creatives sort of have this responsibility to history to tell stories that help new generations just put in context or give them painting vivid picture for them um and because these things can be traumatic and very difficult they are traumatic and difficult to write about do you think creators have that kind of responsibility to history um um no i i don't think it's a responsibility because i think that there's some writers who are not interested in doing that i think that's fine but i i think i have a responsibility i think that if you make the choice to write realistic fiction about something that happened then you do have a responsibility to to get the facts right so usually i i don't have a lot of patience for writers who base things in historical facts and then decide to really play with important details um i just feel that that you know i feel that the people who are not going to read the history books they're going to read your novel and they're going to think that's how it actually happened and so you know when i was writing half of the yellow sun i really wanted to i read everything i could find i really wanted to get the big facts right it was really important for me and um and so the things have changed so i invented so there isn't a train station for example which is a town that's about an hour away but because my characters are in sukkah i put the train station there but everything that happens at the train station actually happened so for me i'm thinking if a young person who has no sense of this history reads this book she's going to learn what happened at the train station so it's not a noble but it's a sukkah but you see so my point is that there's things i'm willing to play with but not the things that actually matter yes okay um when you wrote half of the yellow song or when it came out because you said you've been writing it since 2001 yeah um a lot of people are very afraid and still are to talk about the war it's not in nigeria sort of social consciousness at all it's something we kind of there's reference to its ish but not really and i won't change no no i mean there's a lot of interest sort of like on social media i know that for sure but in terms of general consciousness the way in israel everybody understands the gravity of the holocaust we don't have that um i want to know where you got that bravery to be like nope this is the book i'm writing i don't know actually i don't know i i it just i've always um but you know it's also interesting to me because the things people tell me were brave but i think i mean it's nice to be cold breathe but i i didn't think they were brave i just thought you know if you've been haunted by something your whole life and you just feel this this need and this sort of it's almost like a compulsion when i was 10 i was just deeply interested in biafra because i grew up knowing that my grandfathers had died in the war i grew up knowing this war had happened but not quite understanding what had happened and my father talked endlessly about his father endlessly i know so much about my grandfather i never met him and every time my father's stories would get to the war something would change in his spirit right and it took a while before he told me the story of how his father died he couldn't cross the occupied ruins um and how wounded he felt because he didn't fulfill his final duties as a son which is to bury your father and his father was buried in a mass grave and after the war my father went to the refugee camp and they just pointed very vaguely at an area and my father goes and he takes a handful of sand and that sand is still in our house and um so i i think i just always i wanted i was just always i don't know haunted compelled um and yes when i started writing the novel people said to me you know leave it alone it's but it never occurred to me to leave it alone i mean how can you leave alone something that that has haunted you your whole life i just it wasn't an option i remember as well thinking i'm going to write this book it might not do well but that's fine right um i'm a person who often thinks what's the worst that can happen and the worst that can happen is that nobody will buy the book but i'm going to write it yeah okay um in the past you've mentioned procrastinating through reading and poetry and youtube what are you currently reading or watching um actually i don't really do youtube a lot now i now do netflix on amazon prime am i reading i'm reading a lot of things i'm reading a lot of poetry i'm reading um ah so yeah just some poems okay watching watching i haven't really watched anything or watching a turkish show on netflix called um see i never know the names but it's actually quite lovely it's a there's a there's a psychiatrist and there's this woman who goes to see the psychiatrist and but anyway it's turkish i usually like things like my languages other than english okay so that's how i'm wasting my time i'm also reading and reading a few novels i'm reading a history of west africa okay um you've moved firmly from being just this literary icon and now yaki a star a global star um have you ever been anxious about increased scrutiny and do you ever feel like you need to reassert the fact that you're a writer first um sometimes i mean anxious about increased scrutiny it's not so much there's um i think that's i'm learning that one of the consequences of a certain kind of theme is paranoia so i i find that lately i've come to recognize my own paranoia i think that fame means you start to see that people no longer actually see you as human and so you have certain experiences with people and suddenly you're really paranoid about everyone and and for me there's a sadness there because i think it means then that one loses out on potential you know connections and friendship and that kind of thing but no anxious about scrutiny it comes with the territory i think and um so no i don't think so but about being a writer there are times when especially when you know people want me to talk about the problem of gender in the world and i'm thinking i don't know what the solution is right i just want to read a poem um and so i think that's the problem with being a writer who's socially sort of engaged and i have always been but my first love is literature storytelling and i'm actually a lot more of a dreamer than anything else but i think that the part of me that is not a dreamer the part that's angry about injustice in the world and that part is there by the way very angry i think it's the part that people i think it's an easier part it's less complicated and so it's easier to deal with and because of that i think that's what maybe people you know the people who i think don't even know me as a right i'm just no feminist right and i don't think that's all i do i think people think i wake up in the morning and drink feminists for breakfast feminist for lunch and so there are times when i want to say you know i'm actually a person who really just wants to dream okay and we have thousands and thousands of people who have joined from around the world and they sent in some amazing questions so we're going to go through those if you don't mind um from osme okay has motherhood affected how you see the world and how you write or what you write about um how i see the world yes yes absolutely i am um my daughter is the loveliest human being the brightest funniest most charming child and she's changed she's changed everything for me she's made me see i i think she's made me more worried about the world because i want to protect her from everything she's made me a lot more um conscious of things that i you know i cared about before but now it's really so i care is so much about you know what's the content of children's cartoons you know and i get very upset about it kind of thing um but but yeah it's and the way that i my writing probably not i don't know it has made me interested in children's books so i'm thinking about that oh that would be lovely that would be amazing from susanna rigg is there something you know now you wish you had known at the start of your career um yes quite a few things um um so i think well when i started out i wanted to be read i've always i mean for me really the the the truest measure of success is to connect with somebody else through your work and that's what i always wanted and i i feel very fortunate that it's happened what comes with success sometimes is you're no longer sure if people are telling you the truth and and for me that's a problem because i do i don't like and i sometimes worry that you know it's kind of be careful what you wish for you get it and then it comes with certain i don't know things that you're not so sure of so maybe what i would tell myself is yes you should want to be read yes you should want success but you have to remember that it comes with some bits of oh the other thing the other thing really is um editors the publishing the publishing world today is so and i think i think it's not just publishing really i think there's a kind of corporate um takeover of the world which often means then that um there's a loss of quality so i think that in publishing you have editors who are so overwhelmed um that the actual editing the sort of gritty editing isn't done as well as it could be um i think there's that i think also i wish i had known when i started out that there's a lot about publishing that has nothing to do with the book what do you mean um there's a lot that is sort of extra literary so the idea that you have to sing and dance to sell a book um i think some writers do well with it i don't necessarily mind it but when you're starting out i think it's important to keep that in mind because not everybody does well with it and i sometimes wish that it didn't have to be part of part of writing you know and i think it's worse now with social media because i hear from young writers who say you know you get a book accepted and they tell you you have to go on social media and post things and you know sing and dance on your head and and i i i worry about that because i i just think it's i think it's bad for literature from anna how or when do you write your opening and do you find it to be the hardest part of writing um no no sometimes the opening comes to me first and um so with half of the yellow sun i knew that i was starting with one i knew i was starting with ugu going to mascara's house but i didn't know what would happen afterwards so openings are it's actually endings on the middle that's that's hard for me not the opening okay from sofia howe chimamanda you clearly take very seriously educating yourself about what you write about i have learned so much from your storytelling do you feel an obligation to educate to avoid the danger of a single story as you call it in your ted talk thank you for everything you do thank you yes i think that at the answer yes i i do feel an obligation to educate and i think that can be a bit annoying to the people close to me because i you know i'm known to give unnecessary lectures from time to time on subjects that nobody cares about but i i am because i'm i think i am the person i think of myself as a student an internal student i'm always looking to learn and there's a sense in which um you know i think about shinochi we're talking about the writer as a teacher and while i don't think my view is necessarily that clear-cut it makes me happy to think that somebody will read my story and learn something and it doesn't matter what they're learning and and because i approach fiction from a place of um of knowledge i i say to my my students when i teach when you're going to write something learn everything you can about it and in your story you might not actually use anything that you learned but there's a confidence that you bring to that subject because you know so much and it's there and and in writing the story you don't know that confidence it you know somebody who's reading that story comes away with more because they they've been in the hands of a master right i'm not somebody who's just armed with knowledge i think that the best thing to arm oneself is knowledge so yes i am if i if i hadn't had the good fortune to be a writer or to be read because i would have been a writer anyway i would absolutely be a full-time professor teaching that would be an awesome lecture i would probably get into trouble as well ioanna andrei asks which books have inspired you of a quarantine um every time i ask that question i actually actually i always forget what what have i loved recently um jane canyon's poems i really loved um and then i i went through you know really difficult time so i i i read john didion's um magical thinking actually stopped halfway because then i realized if you're grieving you really shouldn't be reading about grief um oscillate blanket um for barack obama's memoir which i recently read um i can't think of what else i really loved a writer i i deeply adore um is elizabeth hardwick and i feel as i'm constantly rereading her because she i just really really love her so i reread her um during lockdown i read a lot but i a lot of things that i just sort of you know they're fine but [Laughter] okay well i can tell you what i read what did you do that is the quora oh right um amongst many other things but yes yes i noticed that you very cleverly mentioned the bond between them yes i really i really liked it i appreciated it a lot considering the distance as well it can be hard when you can't see a person's face you know you're feeling the blank sometimes and you're not necessarily the most generous with your thinking towards the person so [Laughter] okay all right um from danielle kaine is my favorite character in the book all of her flaws and unbotheredness somehow resonates as much as we strive to be beautiful and patient like lana as black women we are often were more frequently misunderstood and seen as kind in it why was building a character like kenya important for you and what does she represent i really love the sort of shady we try to be patient and beautiful because i feel exactly the same way the question is from danielle yeah daniel i feel exactly the same way um annoyed me sometimes and like you know darling we can't all be perfect i sorry what was the question um why was it important to build a character like kane for you and what does she represent she represents um i think a number of things i i think i just found her interesting that's right i found her interesting and i i like the the mystery of her and obviously that mystery is sustained because we don't see her from her point of view we see her from other people's point of view um i think maybe i wanted to question certain things what we consider mainstream attractiveness so in in the african context she's very skinny which for women in our culture we don't consider necessarily considered attractive she's dark-skinned in a culture that values light skin um but so i wanted her to but i think she's very interesting and i wanted to be her friend and so i kind of wanted to i think play with the idea of what what we ex what we consider um the ideal woman i think online in many ways fits that i mean she's so good right so she takes she takes baby and loves her as her own and for me that's such an act of you know what i'm thinking really although although i think it's she does it for herself in a way as much as for him but still i mean it's such a good woman act yeah from from day one too yeah we've been like what and i feel as though kanye is the person i get more so i really wanted to um yeah i guess i wanted to celebrate the idea of um of not sticking to convention yeah okay from chikezy what aspect of the nigeria of biafra war period still persists today and gives you the most concern well first of all i think we need a truth and reconciliation um we need we really need a sort of sustained honest open truth and reconciliation process in nigeria about that period i believe that very strongly um the things that i think there's so much about nigeria today that is linked to that period um there's still the question of abandoned property for example hasn't been resolved i mean the the houses in forsake owned by people that were taken forcibly away from them and never returned and the the all of them were people who lost all the money they had in biafra and we're giving 50 pounds 20. well so actually some people said they've got 50. okay um it's not been i mean nobody's talked about it right and and then i mean basic things and so what's happened when we talked today about when you look at nigeria today economically you realize that there's a part of the country land where the economic power is new and it's new because when in 1970 you had nothing you start from scratch and so when in the 70s um people have access to buying you know government property and reduced rates or buying shares and companies that have been newly decolonized there's a part of the country that can't participate because they don't have the capital and so when you look today at a lot of sort of real corporate nigeria there isn't there isn't much of an evil presence and we can trace it back to 1970 but also i think in a larger sense it's that feeling of them this is what i like to call it shame i think it's the shame of the defeated and so there's a sense in which it will people still feel the need it seems as though i mean the people who said to me that because i wrote about biafra i'm not a true nigerian and i am a tribalist it's because to be able and to be proud of your immoralness immediately makes you suspect and so there's a sense in which one is expected to first of all um sort of claim your stake in your nigerian-ness before you can then talk about your ibookness otherwise you automatically suspect and it's because of that period and so i i really feel that i really would like for us to have sort of an open where people will talk about we also need to talk about who killed whom the people are alive today who are very active in that period i'm not going to name names but i have them in my head and we should talk about that if for nothing else i really believe in in people acknowledging i sometimes feel that sometimes just to acknowledge somebody else's pain makes such a huge difference just to say i acknowledge your opinion and i'm sorry i think it makes a huge difference and i'd like that to happen in nigeria from alex if you could spend the day with one of your characters who would it be and why from half of a yellow son or from i would kind of for sure [Music] totally hang with her would probably argue but i forget her name but there was a neighbor there's this annoying neighbor that they that um orlana had when they moved um to this small one room she was always asking for something extra always asking for something more is that all you're going to give me but just watch her from a distance such an annoying you know when people say compound people such an annoying woman but very unashamed of herself but she's seen it like nice i just enjoy it so much someone should give her something out of kindness and she'll be like is that all [Laughter] i enjoy um from adam what advice would you give to minority writers who feel sometimes conflicted about how best to express their voice and their perspective and have it touch people from other walks of life to them the most important thing i would say is never ever apologize for who you are for your story do not apologize do not try to soften your story temper it change it to fit what you imagine the mainstream wants and the reason i say that is that it doesn't work right if your story is a good story i believe that something that's written well will find its home and i know the pressure of being in the minority it doesn't matter whether it's race um or it's sexual orientation there's a pressure because you know you're not in the mainstream but at the same time i think that's why it's even more important to tell your story don't apologize when i started out i remember thinking i needed to write the kind of fiction that was being published which is immigrant fiction where the person comes to america and everything is good and the country is terrible and you know and actually wrote that a very bad novel and it wasn't published and i'm so grateful it wasn't published because it was a lie it was me trying to do what i thought would sell oh you know what was the cool thing it wasn't the thing that was true to me and when i read purple hibiscus i think that there were many agents who just thought nobody cares about this but then you know readers i think i'm really hungry for stories that are unfamiliar i really believe that it's the gatekeepers who think that people want to read the same thing over and over again and so purple hypothesis was finally published by this very small independent house and didn't have much of a budget so i went to two cities on book tour and in both cities like three people came to my events but the thing is that that it started selling in independent book stores because people just started reading the book and so i like to tell the story to minority writers and to women writers because you know write the story write it well do the bloody best you can do not ever apologize for where you're coming from and it will find at home from caroline millet assuming you've experienced failure what have you learned from it [Laughter] oh you're a winner of winners well as we know i don't know what failure is um what do i learn from it i'm a believer in when you fall down i personally want to lie there for a little bit and then i get up and when i say that i mean i believe in letting myself feel bad and i believe in a small slices of self-pity just you know i believe in it i think you know when people say i feel as though it's sort of this kind of motivational talk don't let yourself be put down by fear conquer fear and i feel like i don't know how to what i do know how to is to sort of feel it for a bit and then move on i'm a i'm a i'm a hard worker i'm a person who's always worked hard and so for me failure so for example when my the first book i wrote was not accepted for publication i had weeks of thinking these people are mad because this book is fantastic how can they not want to publish it and then i also then went through a period of just being sad and then a period of thinking well why haven't they accepted this which means what is wrong with this and how can i fix it so that's kind of for me it's a question of what can i learn from it after feeling bad because i will feel bad and i allow myself to feel bad but then but then i always get up i always get up that's lovely sometimes when i'm obsessed my mom would say are you still feeling sorry for yourself or can we move on you know i mean i think like it becomes a problem when you just sort of then just sort of wallow himself right but i think self-pity has its uses because we're human you're human i'm just i don't believe in this idea of sort of the super humaneness where people say strong i don't think that strong means an absence of a weakness of fear i think strong means an ability to acknowledge that weakness and fear and keep going that's how i think of it that's fantastic um thank you so so much for answering everyone's questions and well as many as we could get to um and so i'm going to let you say goodbye um some last one so just to say thank you again i also wanted everyone to see lovely bessie i guess he has the just the most gorgeous breasts i think it's really important to see i love it because i think you just said there's something about it that's just sort of um unapologetically woman so thank you so much to everyone who's signed on thank you again to kate and thank you to the women's prize it's meant so much to me and really particularly for me at a very dark time in my life it felt like a small sliver of light so thank you all right thank you very much and now i'll be handing back over to kate moss over in the uk joel that was a fantastic interview chimamanda so lovely to see you i wish we were all in the same shared space to see the silver betty one of the things that has been amazing about the women's prize for fiction is that all the very many years ago nearly 30 years ago when we first had the idea for a prize that every year would honor celebrate and amplify women's fiction from all over the world we were got going by too much older women the anonymous donor who puts up prize money every year from a trust fund and the sculptor grizzle niven who donated a cast of that tiny bessie that shim amanda just held up the one and only silver bessie um every winner gets a different bronze betty every year so that each winner would have something physical if you like to remind them of winning the prize and i've never forgotten that that a group of younger women were helped on their way by two much older women both of whom have gone now but we are very very grateful to them we're also incredibly grateful to everybody in lagos who make this evening possible that everybody um doing the tech stuff it's been complicated doing it um from all over the world and from these different venues uh but thank you so much for bearing with us and it's a wonder to see so many people from many many countries supporting women's prize tonight i want to say a big thank you of course at los angeles fremantle nat west and bailey's and to all the individual uh women who are patrons who support the prize if you do want to in any way support the price just go to our website uh there are many ways you can get involved because as we know making sure that women's voices continue to be heard is something that we all need to keep doing every single day and do it with joy and optimism hope because that is how we avoid as chimamanda says the danger of a single story my big takeaway from this evening um which i'm going to um you know adopt immediately is the idea that small slices of self-pity are okay and i think that if chimamanda ngozi adichie says that then the rest of us can lie on the ground for a little bit longer it's been a wonderful evening i hope you've enjoyed it do please engage with us on social media at this year's judges are already hard at work reading we will be announcing the longest and the shortlist and then the winner of the 2021 women's prize for fiction on the 16th of june next year and we are very much hoping that we will all be able to do it in person in a shared space but for now it doesn't matter what you're reading but if you enjoy it pass it on tell other women tell other men tell all the readers about the books that you love and any book that matters lives outside of its time so half of the yellow sun was brand new in 2007 when it won the prize it has as relevant and beautiful today and one of the things about the women's prize is trying to have a library of books by women past present and yet to come that we can all share and we can see all of our stories reflected so from me for now good night and i hope you've enjoyed the evening [Music] you

Channel: Women's Prize for Fiction

Views: 20,655

Keywords: Women's Prize For Fiction, Orange Prize for Fiction, Books, Women, Novels, Publisher

Id: l--x-H2WYTw

Length: 57min 6sec (3426 seconds)

Published: Mon Dec 07 2020