Chimamanda Adichie at the Hay Festival 2012

For ten days,  the Hay Festival will feature debates and conversations with poets and scientists, novelists and historians, artists and gardeners, comedians and musicians, filmmakers and politicians. Chimamanda Adichie--award winning author of Purple Hibiscus, Half of a Yellow Sun and The Thing Around Your Neck--will join other writers at the Hay this year. She will be talking about The Commonwealth Lecture, even as the Hay host for the first time the announcement of the winners of the Commonwealth Book Prize and the Short Story Prize. The judges will discuss the judging process and the winning writers will be in conversation with Harriett Gilbert.  (We are working towards bringing you pictures from the event. So check back for those.)

Adichie has been part of the Rainbow Book Club's Get Nigeria Reading Campaign.

Last week, she wrote in the Financial Times about a man of grace, her Uncle Mai.

Sometimes he laughed aloud, short joyous bursts, at his own stories: how my grandfather had refused to leave our fallen hometown and had instead dug a hole in the front yard and climbed in with his rusted Dane gun, how he, Uncle Mai, was so filthy and soap-deprived towards the end of the war that he climbed into a stream and bathed with raw unripe cassava, although he was not sure whether the cassava made him even dirtier. And as he spoke, I thought of the word “grace”. He was an easy man to like, a man who forgave easily. He was also a man who believed easily. In the months of his illness, many purveyors of health trooped through his compound gates: Pentecostal prayer warriors, traditional herbalists, self-styled doctors. They brought him specially cooked meals, or they lit candles and prayed all night or they claimed to unearth the cause of his illness in the soil beneath the ube tree.

 Go here to read the rest of the piece.