Welcome to the New Yorker Radio Hour.

I'm David Remnick.

The novelist Chimamanda Ingoza Adich, who was born in Nigeria, has won a raft of awards,

including the Genius Grants as it's known, the MacArthur Fellowship,

and a National Book Critic Circle Award for her best-selling novel, Americana.

But who cares about that? Because how many fiction writers have been sampled by Beyonce?

We teach girls to shrink themselves, to make themselves smaller. We say to girls, you can have ambition, but not too much. You should

aim to be successful, but not too successful. Otherwise, you will threaten the man. Because I am

female, I'm expected to aspire to marriage. But Aditya is not a woman easily cowed by fame.

She later questioned the attention that came her way,

the assumption that she should somehow be grateful.

And she criticized Beyoncé, saying in so many words,

that the singer spent maybe a little bit too much time talking about men.

In her novels, Adichie has written about life in Nigeria

and that country's long civil war,

and about a Nigerian immigrant in the United States who became a popular blogger.

I sat down with Adichie at the New Yorker Festival in October,

and she told me about her experience of coming to live in America as a young woman.

I came to the U.S. because I was fleeing the study of medicine.

You were running away. Yes. I had started in Nigeria in medical school because you know you do

well in school they tell you you have to be a doctor and I kind of went along with that and I had it all

nicely planned out. I was going to become a psychiatrist and then I was going to use my patient stories for my fiction.

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