A black woman, an African author, Ngozi Adichie, on June 6th 2007 won one of Britain’s biggest literary prizes for women.

The £30,000 12th Orange Broadband prize for fiction was awarded to the young Nigerian writer whose story was centred on the 1967/70 Nigerian civil war. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie novel, Half of a Yellow Sun, follows five people through the darkest period of the South-Eastern Nigerians, Igbos, the Biafra, and is focused around three principal characters: an educated young woman, her houseboy, and her sister's shy English lover.