Yaa Gyasi

Yaa Gyasi was born in Ghana and raised in Huntsville, Alabama. She studied English at Stanford University and earned an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Her fiction draws on both Ghanaian and American histories, often asking how inherited circumstances shape identity, belief and belonging.

Her debut, Homegoing, begins with half-sisters Effia and Esi in eighteenth-century Ghana. One lives in Cape Coast Castle while the other is imprisoned in its dungeon before being transported across the Atlantic. Alternating between their descendants, the novel follows two family lines through enslavement, colonialism, migration and racial injustice. Its linked chapters give individual lives room while building a broad historical arc.

Gyasi’s second novel, Transcendent Kingdom, is more intimate in scale. Its narrator, Gifty, is a Ghanaian American neuroscientist studying reward-seeking behavior while wrestling with addiction, depression, evangelical Christianity and grief. Across both novels, Gyasi returns to family memory, displacement and the uneasy relationship between what people inherit and what they can change.

Homegoing received the PEN/Hemingway Award and the National Book Critics Circle’s John Leonard Award, and Gyasi was named a National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 honoree. It is the best starting point: ambitious but accessible, it introduces her recurring concerns through Effia, Esi and the generations that follow them.