The North Star Award is the Hurston/Wright Foundation’s highest honor, “celebrating an individual whose career exemplifies achievement and inspiration to others in the field of literature.” This year’s prize will be awarded to the award-winning author and feminist, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. Previous winners of the prize include Ntozake Shange, Ernest Gaines, and Rita Dove.
According to the prize organizers, the North Star Award pays “homage to the significance of the North Star for enslaved Africans, who looked to it as a guide to freedom. The recipients of the award are individuals whose writing and/or service to the writing community serves as a beacon of brilliant accomplishment and as an inspiration to others.”
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is the author of award-winning and best-selling novels, including Americanah and Half of a Yellow Sun; the short story collection The Thing Around Your Neck; and the essays We Should All Be Feminists and Dear Ijeawele, or A Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions. A recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, she divides her time between the United States and Nigeria
Adichie will receive the award at the virtual event which will be happening at 7:00 PM EST on October 15, 2021.
Also on this year’s Hurston/Wright Foundation Legacy Awards, which recognizes literary excellence by Black writers from the United States and around the world, two Nigerian writers, Tola Rotimi Abraham and Ben Okri have been nominated in the Debut Novel Category and Fiction Category.Abraham is being nominated in the Debut Novel Category for his book Black Sunday; Ben Okri in the fiction category for his book The Freedom Artist.
A big congratulations to Chimamanda Adichie, Ben Okri, and Tola Rotimi Abraham!
Recent Comments