Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie to receive prestigious honorary degree tomorrow

Award-winning novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie to receive an honorary degree from Johns Hopkins University in Maryland, United States.

The Americanah author is listed among eight “distinguished achievers” who will receive honorary degrees this year.

Other achievers include groundbreaking filmmaker Spike Lee, Nobel Prize winner Richard Axel and Ellen M Heller, Maryland’s first woman to become an administrative Circuit Court judge.

Johns Hopkins University President Ronald J Daniels says the group are “visionaries who have challenged the status quo and changed the world for the better”.

“They have made a lasting impact on the arts, public health, the law, neuroscience, and the resilience of communities here in Baltimore and across the globe,” he continued. “At Johns Hopkins, we share their commitment to innovate and to work for the benefit of humankind, and I’m so pleased that these honorary degrees will celebrate all they have accomplished.”

The honorary degrees will be conferred at a commencement ceremony on 18 May.

Adichie earned a prestigious creative writing master’s from Johns Hopkins in 2003.

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