Yaa Gyasi is a Ghanaian-American novelist. Her work, most notably her 2016 debut novel Homegoing and her 2020 novel Transcendent Kingdom, features themes of lineage, generational trauma, and Black and African identities.
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It is a dual thing - you belong and you don’t. I remember the Ghanaian passport official reading my name correctly and it felt like the biggest, warmest welcome.
On the duality of identity when visiting Ghana in “Yaa Gyasi: ‘Slavery is on people’s minds. It affects us still’” in The Guardian (2017
I thought the novel would be traditionally structured, set in the present, with flashbacks to the 18th century.
On what she originally envisioned for her novel Homegoing in “Yaa Gyasi: ‘Slavery is on people’s minds. It affects us still’” in The
I was devastated. I felt immense rage. The dungeons still smell after hundreds of years. There was grime on the walls and a tiny air hole at the top.
On taking a trip to Ghana’s Cape Coast Castle where slaves were incarcerated in “Yaa Gyasi: ‘Slavery is on people’s minds. It affects us
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About this person
Yaa Gyasi is a Ghanaian-American novelist. Her work, most notably her 2016 debut novel Homegoing and her 2020 novel Transcendent Kingdom, features themes of lineage, generational trauma, and Black and African identities. At the age of 26, Gyasi won the National Book Critics Circle's John Leonard Award for Best First Book, the PEN/Hemingway Award for Debut Novel, the National Book Foundation's 5 Under 35 honors for 2016 and the 2017 American Book Award. She was awarded a Vilcek Prize for Creative Promise in Literature in 2020. As of 2019, Gyasi lives in Brooklyn, New York.
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