Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie: Dream Count - Gespräch, Lesung und Signierstunde

In the organizer's words:

Four women whose lives intersect: Chia is a travel writer looking for a sense of home. Zikora is a lawyer and single mother. Kadiatou works as a domestic help for Chia and fights for justice after a sexual assault. Omelogor, Chia's cousin, is a financial analyst in Lagos, dropped out of university in the USA and writes a blog about relationships and sexuality.

With Dream Count (tr: Asal Dardan, Jan Schönherr, 2025), Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, one of the most important literary voices of our time, presents a new novel. In it, she tells of love and loss, of friendship and self-determination - and of the courage to take control of one's own life. Dream Count is "a great story of solidarity among four women between Nigeria and the United States" (FAZ).

In the 25th anniversary year of the international literature festival berlin (ilb), the festival has been able to win Adichie for the only appearance in Berlin, one of a total of two in Germany.

Three years after her speech at the opening of the Humboldt Forum 2021, in which she called for courage and responsibility in dealing with the colonial past, Adichie is returning to this place. She presents her new book, reads selected passages and talks about the four women in her novel - and about the fifth woman, the author herself.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is one of the great voices of world literature. Her work has been translated into 55 languages. In 2013, she received the Heartland Prize for Fiction and the National Book Critics Circle Award for "Americanah". Her novel "Blue Hibiscus" was nominated for the Booker Prize and "Half the Sun" won the Orange Prize for Fiction 2007. With her TED Talk "We should all be Feminists", the Nigerian firmly anchored feminism in pop culture. The text is available in German in the FISCHER paperback: "Mehr Feminismus! A manifesto and four stories". Most recently published in the FISCHER paperback "Liebe Ijeawele. Wie unsere Töchter selbstbestimmte Frauen werden" (2017) and "Trauer ist das Glück, geliebt zu haben" (2021) from S. FISCHER. In 2018, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie was awarded the PEN Pinter Prize and the Everett M. Rogers Award. In 2019, she was awarded the Kassel Citizens' Prize "The Glass of Reason". In 2020, she received the International Hermann Hesse Prize for "Blue Hibiscus". Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie was born in Nigeria in 1977 and now lives in Lagos and the USA.

An event of the international literature festival berlin (ilb) in cooperation with the Humboldt Forum Foundation in the Berlin Palace, the American Academy in Berlin and the publishing house S. Fischer.

The discussion with Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie will be held in English. Afterwards, there will be an opportunity to purchase Dream Count and have it signed.

The 25th ilb will take place from September 11 - 24, 2025.

Further information:

- Price: 28 € regular / 14 € reduced

- Language: English

- Location: Hall 1