Born in the town of Enugu, she grew up in the university town of Nsukka in south-eastern Nigeria, where the University of Nigeria is situated. While she was growing up, her father was a professor of statistics at the University, and her mother worked there as the university registrar.

At the age of 19, Adichie left Nigeria and moved to the United States for college. After studying at Drexel University in Philadelphia, she transferred to Eastern Connecticut State University to live closer to her sister, who had a medical practice in Coventry (now in Mansfield, Connecticut). She continued studying communications and political science. She received a university degree from Eastern, where she graduated summa cum laude in 2001.

In 2003, she completed a master's degree in creative writing at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. In 2008, she received a Master of Arts in African studies at Yale University. Chimamanda is a 2008 MacArthur Fellow.

Adichie had her first novel published in 2003. It received excellent reviews and won a literary award for first books. Her second novel won the 2007 Orange Prize for fiction.

In 2008, Adichie was a Visiting Writer at Wesleyan University in Connecticut, where she participated in Wesleyan's Distinguished Writers Series.

• Her first novel, Purple Hibiscus, was published in 2003 and won the 2005 Commonwealth Writers' Prize for Best First Book.
• Her second novel, Half of a Yellow Sun, named after the flag of the short-lived Biafran nation, is set before and during the Biafran War. It was published by Fourth Estate in the UK and by Knopf/Anchor in 2006. It was awarded the 2007 Orange Prize for Fiction.
• Her third book, a collection of short stories titled The Thing Around Your Neck, was published in April 2009 by Fourth Estate in the UK and Knopf in the US.