Chimamanda was born in 1977 in Nigeria, where she also grew up. She went to the United States at the age of nineteen and she graduated at Yale, Princeton and Harvard University. She released her first novel, Purple Hibiscus, seven years after her arrival to US. Another book from the period of the Nigerian Civil War, Half of a Yellow Sun, came three years later, and the book was even filmed. It was published in Czech by the publisher BBart in 2008. These two were followed by a collection of short stories - The Thing Around Your Neck. Among other things, Chimamanda won the British Book Award and the Commonwealth Writers' Prize. Since the author has spent most of her adult life in the United States, she is able to compare American lifestyle with reality of her native country. The readers will be interested by a concise description of problems of the American citizens with African roots. This theme is, in fact, the main leitmotif of the novel Americanah, which is now, thanks to the Publisher Host, in Czech translation of Petr Štadler.