Yaa Gyasi

Yaa Gyasi is a Ghanaian American novelist, born in 1989 in Mampong, Ghana, and raised in Huntsville, Alabama, after her family moved to the United States. She studied English at Stanford and holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop. Her debut, Homegoing (2016), traces two branches of an eighteenth-century Ghanaian family across seven generations and won the PEN/Hemingway Award, the National Book Critics Circle's John Leonard Award and the American Book Award; the National Book Foundation named her one of its 5 Under 35. Her second novel, Transcendent Kingdom (2020), follows a Ghanaian American neuroscientist and was longlisted for the Booker Prize and shortlisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction.