Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie says she is terrified her children will ‘join the manosphere’ | Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie said she was terrified that her young children would “join the manosphere”.

Speaking at the Cheltenham Literary Festival on Saturday, the Nigerian-American author of works including Americana told the audience that having two sons made her “more worried” about men and boys.

“I keep reading these articles about the atmosphere, and I just read a book about how men suffer, how boys suffer, and now I’m terrified that not only will my boys struggle through their teenage years, but they’ll somehow join the atmosphere and start talking about how a woman should be in the kitchen or something,” she said.

She added, “But that won’t happen in reality. I won’t respond well to this nonsense,” sparking laughter from the audience.

Adichie and her husband, Ivara Esigie, have three children: a 10-year-old daughter, and twin boys who are one and a half years old.

She said that the children “will grow up in a completely different world from the world I grew up in and my husband grew up in.” “I think they are lucky to have a good father. But sometimes I think: Do we have what it takes to make sure they do well? And I am very keen for them to do well.”

For Adichie, feminism is “dreaming about how to make the world better.” “Part of that dream for me — now, as a mother of boys — involves being more interested in boys.” She added: “We should talk more about boys and men. It’s important. Because boys. We should talk more about boys and men.” We are Struggling.”

Adichie appeared at the festival to receive the Sunday Times Prize for Literary Excellence, receiving a copy of the first edition of Chinua Achebe’s novel God’s Arrow, which she described as “his greatest novel”. She then discussed her latest novel, Dream Count, with Times literary critic Joanna Thomas Corr.

While Adichie has spoken extensively about feminism, she has not addressed the backlash she has faced in recent years for her views on trans women. The criticism began in 2017 after a Channel 4 interview in which she said that “when people talk about ‘Are trans women women?’, I feel like trans women are trans women.” In an interview with The Guardian in February of this year, she did not answer questions on the subject, and only approached the topic later in the interview: “What do I want to say about cancel culture? Cancel culture is bad. We have to stop it. End of story.”

When asked in Cheltenham what women should do about issues such as the rollback of reproductive rights in the United States, Adichie said: “Women have really done everything they should do. I want to talk about what men should do.”

“In general, women will listen to women and men, and men will listen to men. So I think we need to recruit some good men to go out there and talk to other men.”