Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is a Nigerian novelist and short-story writer and recipient of a 2008

MacArthur Foundation Fellowship. Her second novel, Half of a Yellow Sun, won the Orange Prize and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Her most recent book is a story collection, The Thing around Your Neck (Granta). A longer version of this interview, conducted by Susan VanZanten, appears in Image’s International Issue. She speaks in this interview published by Book Browse. Excerpts:

What led you to write a book about the Nigeria-Biafra war?
I wrote this novel because I wanted to write about love and war, because I lost both grandfathers in the Nigeria-Biafra war, because the war changed the cause of Igbo history, because “Biafra” is still an incredibly potent word in Nigeria today, because many of the issues that led to the war remain unresolved, because my father has tears in his eyes when he speaks of losing his father, and my mother has never spoken at length about losing her father, because almost every Igbo person alive in the 1960s was affected by the pre-war massacres, because colonialism makes me angry, because the thought of the egos of organisations and men leading to the unnecessary deaths of children makes me angry, because I think we are in danger of forgetting.

I have always been fascinated by Biafra. I have always wanted to write about it. It was not just because my parents told so many stories of how they lived through the Nigeria-Biafra war but because I realised how central Biafra was to my history. Because I grew up in the shadow of Biafra.

Given that, at the time of the war, you hadn’t yet been born, what sort of research did you do to prepare for writing this book? Was it important to you that you get all the “facts” of the war correct for this work of fiction?
My parents’ stories formed the backbone of my research. And I read a lot of books about the war. I talked to a lot of people. In the four years that it took to finish the book, I would often ask older people I met, “Where were you in 1967?” and then take it from there. It was from stories of that sort that I found out tiny details that are important for fiction.

As for adhering to the facts, I invented a train station in Nsukka, invented a beach in Port Harcourt, changed the distance between towns, but it was important that I get the facts that mattered right. All the major political events in the book are “factually” correct. But what was most important to me was emotional truth. I wanted this to be a book about human beings, not a book about faceless political events. For research, I have a lot of research notes that I did not end up using because I did not want to be stifled by fact, did not want the political events to overwhelm the human story.

You say you think “we are in danger of forgetting.”Can you talk further about how the war is treated in Nigeria today?
The war is still talked about, still a potent political issue. But I find that it is often talked about in uninformed and unimaginative ways–people repeat the same things they have heard and often don’t know the full story. It also remains–surprisingly–very ethnically divisive. The (brave enough) Igbo talk about it and the non-Igbo think the Igbo should get over it.

There is a conflict in this story between what is traditional and tribal versus that which is modern and bureaucratic. How has the conflict played itself out? What is the mix today?
Cultures evolve and things change, of course. What is worrisome is not that we have all learned to think in English, but that our education devalues our culture, that we are not taught to write Igbo and that middle-class parents don’t much care that their children do not speak Igbo.

This is an exciting moment for Nigerian writers; who are some of your favorites, and why do you feel this worldwide resurgence in popularity for Nigerian writers is happening now?
Tanure Ojaide writes beautifully. Sefi Atta has a delicious wit. Chris Abani is wonderfully astute. I didn’t know there was a worldwide popularity in Nigerian writers. I hope there will be.