Dream Count

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is a Nigerian author. She was born in 1977 to an Igbo family in Enugu, Nigeria. She was raised in an academic setting; at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, “her father was a professor, and her mother was the first female Registrar” (“About.” Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie). When Adichie came of age, she enrolled at the University of Nigeria, where she began pursuing a degree in medicine. Only a year later, Adichie changed her career path and immigrated to the United States at the age of 19.

Adichie attended Eastern Connecticut State University, where she earned degrees in communication and political science. Adichie also earned a Master of Fine Arts in creative writing at Johns Hopkins University and a Master of Arts in African history from Yale University. She also received fellowships from the Radcliffe Institute of Harvard University in 2011 and the MacArthur Foundation in 2008.

Adichie launched her career in 2003 with the publication of her debut novel, Purple Hibiscus. Originally published by Algonquin Books, Purple Hibiscus won the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize. In 2006, her sophomore novel, Half of a Yellow Sun, won the Orange Prize. In 2013, Adichie published her third novel, Americanah. The novel was originally published by Alfred A. Knopf, won the US National Book Critics Circle Award, and was named one of the New York Times Top Ten Best Books of 2013. Adichie’s other titles include short story collections, standalone short stories, memoirs, essays, and orations. Her 2012 TEDx Euston Talk “We Should All Be Feminists” was later published as a book in 2014 under the same name. She is also known for her 2009 TED Talk “The Danger of A Single Story.” Other Adichie titles include Dear Ijeawele, or a Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions (2017), The Thing Around Your Neck (2009), Imitation (2009), Notes on Grief (2021), The Shivering (2016), One World: A Global Anthology of Short Stories (2009), The Arrangements (2016), You In America (2006), and Zikora (2020). Dream Count (2025) is her most recent novel.

In Dream Count, the section titled “Zikora” is a reiteration of Adichie’s 2020 standalone short story by the same name.

Adichie is known for the feminist values she expresses in her fiction and in her public life. Her TEDx talk “We Should All Be Feminists,” first delivered in London in 2012, has been viewed more than 6 million times. Adichie argues that patriarchal gender roles hurt both men and women, and therefore people of all genders should be invested in gender equality. She has also spoken out against anti-gay policies in her native Nigeria and in other African countries. However, in 2017, she came under some criticism for insensitive remarks she made about trans women. In a television interview to promote her novel Half of a Yellow Sun, Adichie made comments that many interpreted as implying that trans women are not women. In a later Facebook post, Adichie clarified her comments, stating that she supports transgender rights but continuing to argue for the importance of a distinction between trans and cisgender women, based on the notion that trans women benefit from male privilege before transitioning. For many, this clarification only underlined the harmfulness of Adichie’s original statements. More recently, in 2021, Adichie published on her own website the essay “It is Obscene: A True Reflection in Three Parts,” in which she singled out (but did not name) two of her former mentees, excoriating these writers—one of whom later identified themselves as the trans and nonbinary writer Akwaeke Emezi—for taking advantage of her mentorship and then attacking her in public. 

Across Adichie’s catalogue, she prioritizes women’s stories. Her fiction and nonfiction is also deeply influenced by her Igbo tradition and her Nigerian background. All of her characters are, for example, either Nigerian or Nigerian American and actively wrestle with reconciling these competing cultural traditions and geographical contexts. These themes recur in Dream Count, a novel which is particularly interested in exploring cross-cultural friendships and maternal relationships. In her author’s note at the end of the source text, Adichie claims that while the novel is “about the interlinked desires of four women,” it is also “deeply personal” to her because “it is really about [her] mother” and the experience of “losing [her] mother” (395).

Adichie’s work, particularly Dream Count, is in conversation with other contemporary works of fiction including Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake and Ore Agbaje-Williams’s The Three of Us.