Renowned Nigerian author, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie has said the death of her son has changed how she feels about her home country, telling The New York Times in a recent interview that she does not want to go back to Nigeria.

The Half of a Yellow Sun writer lost her son, Nkanu Nnamdi Esege, on January 7 this year at a private hospital in Lagos following a brief illness.

According to accounts she has since shared, the toddler, one half of a set of twins born in 2024, developed a fever while the family was in Lagos for the Christmas period. Her husband, Dr Ivara Esege, began treating him with antibiotics, but his condition failed to improve, prompting the couple to take him to Euracare Multispecialist Hospital. During an examination there, the child was sedated with propofol ahead of an MRI scan. He went into cardiac arrest and died the following day, before the family could get him to Johns Hopkins University in the United States, where he had been scheduled to be seen.

Adichie has been open about her belief that negligence played a role in her son’s death. Nigeria’s Medical and Dental Council reportedly found evidence of negligence involving three physicians connected to his care and suspended them pending further proceedings, though one has since been cleared.

A coroner’s inquest into the death was opened but remains stayed pending judicial review, and the matter has grown more contentious after Euracare accused Adichie and her husband of destroying evidence by choosing to cremate their son’s body. The couple has said they are not pursuing a lawsuit against the hospital, but want accountability and broader reform of healthcare standards in the country.

In the interview, Adichie described how her connection to Nigeria, long a defining thread in both her life and her fiction, has shifted since the loss.

Asked whether the country still felt like a place she belonged, she gave a blunt answer, saying she does not want to return. She noted that it had been about six months since she had set foot in Nigeria at the time of the conversation, and suggested the only thing that would draw her back would be her surviving children, whose ties to the country remain strong. Her daughter, she said, still refers to Nigeria as her happy place.

The family is now based in Maryland, where Adichie has spoken about grief that continues to shape daily life at home, from her son’s belongings still upstairs to reminders of him beside his twin brother.

For a writer whose work has long explored themes of home, migration and belonging, the loss has added a far more personal and painful chapter to that ongoing story.

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