I Had Twin Boys In April 2024 But Kept It Secret, Says Chimamanda Adichie

The award-winning author Chimamanda Adichie, 47, and her husband welcomed twins in April 2024.

In an interview on Saturday, the writer disclosed that she kept the twins’ birth a secret to “protect” them, adding that Nigerians’ interest in people’s private lives makes her even less inclined to disclose.

“I want to protect my children. I’m okay with having them mentioned, but I don’t want the piece to become about them,” she said.

“So, here is the thing, Nigerians are nosy. They want to know about your personal life. Because of that, I am resistant. I very rarely talk about it,” she said.

In March, Adichie will publish her first full-length book in eleven years.Through the lives of four different women, the book Dream Count explores love, desire, and the complexities of womanhood.

She discussed her unplanned writing hiatus, which began after she became pregnant with her first child.

Adichie claimed that although she was still able to write nonfiction, she spent years trying to re-establish a connection with her creative side after feeling “cast out” from the part of her that creates and imagines.

“I did not want to leave such a long gap between novels. When I got pregnant with my daughter, something just happened,” she said.

“I had a number of years in which I was almost existentially frightened that I wouldn’t write again. It was unbearable.

“There are expressions like ‘writer’s block’ I don’t like to use because I’m superstitious. But I had many years in which I felt cast out from my creative self, cast out from the part of me that imagines and creates; I just could not reach it.

“I could write nonfiction, that was fine. But that’s not what my heart wanted.”

In addition to being a feminist and a novelist, Adichie is married to Nigerian doctor Ivara Esege.

The couple married in 2009 and had their first daughter in 2016. In 2019, Adichie became the first Nigerian to receive the United Nations Foundation’s Global Leadership Award, and she was listed among Time Magazine’s “100 Most Influential People,” the New Yorker’s “20 under 40,” and the New African’s “100 Most Influential Africans.”