

And so I became kind of obsessed with doing these little thought experiments, like if I stayed in Ghana who would I be? If I stayed in Ohio, who would I be? What people thought to be inherent to them, I could see as an outsider as being in part informed by where they had grown up and the people they had grown up around. Gyasi: I was aware of the fact that in each new place that we lived in, there was like a new set of rules, new ideologies. Yet those nomadic years gave her a perspective on how location can help shape a person. Yaa Gyasi: It was Ghana, Ohio, Illinois, Tennessee, Alabama. It was shortlisted for the 2021 Women’s Prize for Fiction.īy the time she was nine, Yaa Gyasi’s family had moved five times. Her second novel, Transcendent Kingdom (2020), follows a Ghanaian American PhD student at Stanford and her struggling family members. Gyasi received a million-dollar advance for the book, which received numerous prizes including the PEN/Hemingway Award and an American Book Award. This research formed the basis of her first novel, Homegoing (2016), about the descendants of two Ghanaian half-sisters, one of whom is sold into slavery in the United States. Gyasi returned to Ghana on a research trip after her sophomore year at Stanford. She earned a BFA at Stanford University and an MFA from the prestigious Iowa Writers’ Workshop.
#Whisperings and wonderings tv#
After stints in Ohio, Illinois, and Tennessee, her family settled in Huntsville, Alabama.Īn omnivorous reader as a child, Gyasi began writing at an early age, winning an award from the TV show Reading Rainbow at age 7.

Yaa Gyasi is an acclaimed novelist, best known for her award-winning debut Homegoing.īorn in 1989 in Mampong, Ghana, Gyasi moved to the United States as an infant so her father could pursue a PhD at Ohio State University.
