A few years ago, over drinks with Ladipo Soetan, a Nigerian writer and lawyer and current President of the Lagos Association of Nigerian Authors, I had lamented the absence of a contemporary Nigerian novel. I had wished for a book that would capture the reality of life for young Nigerians of our generation in the way Chinua Achebe's novels No Longer at Ease and A Man of the People had done for the first generation of post colonial Nigerians. I wanted a story set in contemporary Nigeria the way Arundhati Roy's God of Small Things exposed the face of contemporary India. I wanted a book that captured what it felt like to live through the growing pains of Africa's most enigmatic nation and yet was readable and not couched in dense philosophy. I was convinced that my generation had a story to tell, and that in spite of the harsh economic realities and the death of publishing in Nigeria, that the talent was there to tell the story.

At that point Ladipo drew my attention to a book that would soon be published in the Heinemann's African Writers series by a friend and contemporary of his - Ike Oguine. It is perhaps instructive that I did not have the opportunity to read the book, A Squatter's Tale till I had arrived in the UK, many months later. It was virtually unobtainable in Nigeria. I enjoyed the book and its depiction of Lagos life in the fast paced nineties when the deregulation of the banking sector led to a mushrooming of banks and financial institutions and spawned a generation of sharply dressed bankers who cruised the streets in their flashy cars even while the Nigerian economy deteriorated. Equally amusing was Oguine's clear cut depiction of the Nigerian immigrant experience in the US, something I had never come across before. I was saddened that the book did not receive the attention I felt it deserved.

Two years ago, I was heartened when another young Nigerian writer, Helon Habila won the Caine Prize, the so-called African Booker. I was excited to meet Helon and glad to learn that he had won a publishing contract for his book. Again, I was less than satisfied by the attention generated in the UK by Waiting for an Angel, Helon's lyrical, fictional account of the life of a young Nigerian journalist under the military dictatorship in Nigeria in the mid to late nineties. Reading the book, I relived the memories of the hopes and fears and the exhilaration. Helon has gone on to a writing fellowship at the University of East Anglia and has been on several tours and conference appearances since and I am sure that greater things will come from him. His doggedness and gift have earned him the support he needs to become one of the major voices of contemporary Nigerian literature.

As I celebrated the publication of Helon's and Ike's books and the recognition they were garnering for contemporary Nigerian literature, I had no idea that the next voice to appear on stage would be the voice of one whom for me is literally the girl next door.

When I was five, my family moved into a large house on the Marguerite Cartwright Avenue on the Nsukka campus of the University of Nigeria. That house, number 307 was to be where I spent the greatest part of my growing up years and for a long time, the word "home" conjured up for me the image of that house on the tree-lined avenue named after an obscure American academic who had played a pivotal role in the founding of the University of Nigeria.

About a year after we moved in, there was a flurry of excitement in the house next door which had lain unoccupied for a while, as the University Accommodation Committee battled through the politics of house allocations. Finally we were to have neighbours, all the way from the United States. The famed writer, Chinua Achebe was to be our new neighbour. I was probably less excited about his stature as a writer (even if then, precociously I had read his groundbreaking novel, Things Fall Apart) than by the fact that there would be more children to play with and by the colour-matched silver grey Mercury Monarch and sporty Datsun 280ZX which came to reside in the carport next door. We soon established a friendly neighbourly relationship, sharing the fruit off the avocado tree whose trunk stood on our side of our fence but whose branches and fruit encroached into our neighbours' spaces; attending each other's birthday parties and celebrations and indeed, I often walked to school with Nwando, the last child of the Achebes who was my age and in the same class. I happened to share the same birthday (16th November) with the great writer and I have vague recollections of going over in the late afternoon of my birthday to wish him happy birthday and to receive a glass of Coke from his glamorous wife with her exotic low cut hairstyle and unusual habit of occasionally wearing just one earring.

We lived next door to the Achebes for about ten years and we all existed comfortably as a little community within the confines of our street. I remember a party organized by Mrs Achebe for the Nduka-Okafors who lived opposite when they left for the United States where their mother was studying for her PhD. Present were the Nwoga boys, the five sons of an Igbo father and Irish mother whose dexterity with the Igbo language put many children with two Igbo parents to shame, the Afigbos who lived on the other side of our house (and whose son Ozurumba is unarguably my oldest friend- his mother and mine attended antenatal classes together and were delivered barely a month apart), the Eme Awas who lived at the end of the street and the last of the Achebes- Chidi and Nwando. The Awachies who lived next door to the Achebes on the other side and whose mother ran a nursery school were also present.

After the Achebes moved out, we wondered who our new neighbours would be. We were soon to discover when a little security shed began to be constructed near the gate. Our new neighbours were to be the Deputy Vice Chancellor's family- the Adichies. I knew vaguely the two elder daughters, Uche and Rosemary, beautiful, glamorous and years ahead of me, they were famed for their beauty and intellect and were both undergraduates, the one in pharmacy, the other in medicine. I also knew their brother Chuks, a few years older than me and repeated winner of the yearly disco competitions organized for staff children by the older children of staff going under the name of Big Brothers and Sisters (BB and S). Even more vaguely, I knew that there were a few more younger children but there were, in the strictly hierarchical campus society, below my radar.

Much later, I was to get to know Ngozi Chimamanda, Okey and Kene, the last three of the Adichie children. Even though I was away at boarding school, and later medical school, I soon began to hear about the academic exploits of little Ngozi- how she had topped her year in the Junior school examinations, setting a record, how she had again topped her year in the Senior school examinations and finally how she had published a collection of poems, barely out of secondary school. I had also heard how she would write plays while still in primary school for her classmates to stage. It was at about this time I had my first real conversation with her - my brother who was closer to her in age had told her that I had literary interests as well- and she had come over to chat. I was struck by her maturity and the early promise of her work. She soon gained admission into the University of Nigeria earning a place on the highly competitive Medicine course and then switching after a year to Pharmacy. Somewhere along the line, she published her first play " For the Love of Biafra" which received good reviews in the local press. Soon afterwards, she left for Drexel University in the United States, like Achebe before her abandoning the study of medicine for writing and the arts, in her case, to study communication.

It was in the United States that her abilities began to gain wider recognition, one of her short stories appearing in Zoetrope, an online magazine. That story, You in America, which explored a Nigerian Igbo immigrant girl's experience in the US earned her a nomination for the Caine Prize in 2002, won the year before by Habila. She, unfortunately, did not win , but the exposure was good for her and at about this time, her first novel, Purple Hibiscus was accepted by Algonquin Press in the United States. She has subsequently gone on to garner a string of creative writing scholarships and prizes including the O Henry Award and the PEN/David Wong Prize which she won for her poignant short story, set in Biafra, Half of a Yellow Sun which was published in the prestigious Zoetrope All-Story. She also completed her degree in communications with politics as a minor at Eastern Connecticut State University, graduating summa cum laude. Purple Hibiscus has just been released by Algonquin Press in the United States and will be published early next year in the United Kingdom by Fourth Estate and the Australian, Spanish, Dutch and German rights have been sold. Home is Where the Heart Was, her stirring account of a recent visit to Nsukka, published in Topic magazine in the UK inspired me to think about putting together an anthology to be titled Umu Nsukka: The Children of Nsukka , in celebration of the small university town where we grew up. Her work has also appeared in Wasafiri, PRISM International, Calyx and the Iowa Review.

Purple Hibiscus, an account of a young girl growing up in contemporary Eastern Nigeria has been described as "a stunning debut that captures the fragile beauty of a young woman's awakening at a time when both country and family are on the cusp of change". Nobel prize winner J M Coetzee describes it as " sensitive and touching" and Jason Cowley, past Booker Prize judge has called Purple Hibiscus seductive, tender and true, the best debut I have read since Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things. In addition it has been voted one of the best books of the year by the Black Issues Book Review.

Excited by this development, I recently persuaded this young (just 26 years old!) writer to answer a few questions.