Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s literary agency has fiercely dimissed “delusional” claims that her award-winning novel Half of a Yellow Sun was plagiarised. Nigerian-Welsh author Anne Giwa-Amu alleged in a YouTube video uploaded on Saturday that Half of a Yellow Sun plagiarises her own debut novel, Sade, which was published in 1996. In the video, Giwa-Amu describes Adichie’s book as “a rewrite of Sade” and says that “no one should profit from stealing another person’s work”. Sade is set during the Biafran war and follows the mixed-race daughter of a Nigerian supreme court judge, who falls for a barrister who is engaged. Adichie’s Orange prize-winning novel, published in 2006, follows lives torn apart by the Biafran war, focusing on an educated young woman, her houseboy and her lover, a professor. According to the literary agency, a “professional independent reader” studied both novels and “concluded that there was absolutely no basis for Giwa-Amu’s claim”. But Giwa-Amu continued with it, and in February 2019 her claim was struck out by the court, which found it to be “an abuse of the court’s process”. Giwa-Amu was ordered to pay Adichie and her publishers £14,250, as well as the legal costs incurred by Adichie.
SOURCE: THE GUARDIAN
