Yaa Gyasi

Yaa Gyasi (surname pronounced Jessie) (born 1989) 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.

Early life and education Yaa Gyasi was born in Mampong, Ghana to Sophia, a nurse, and Kwaku Gyasi, a professor of French at the University of Alabama in Huntsville. Her family moved to the United States in 1991 so her father could complete his Ph.D. at Ohio State University. The family also lived in Illinois and Tennessee, and from the age of 10, Gyasi was raised in Huntsville, Alabama.

Gyasi recalls being shy as a child, feeling close to her brothers for their shared experiences as young immigrant children in Alabama, and turning to books as her "closest friends".

Career Shortly after graduating from Stanford, Gyasi began writing her debut novel Homegoing while working at a tech startup company in San Francisco. She resigned in 2012 when she was accepted to the University of Iowa and switched focus to writing full-time. This history contextualizes the novel's story, beginning with half-sisters Effia and Esi in eighteenth-century Ghana. Effia weds a British commander of Cape Coast Castle, while Esi is held captive in the dungeons of the castle before being forced onto a slave ship. The following chapters alternate between the perspectives of Effia's descendent and Esi's descendants, spanning a total of seven generations to present-day United States.

Gyasi's writing has also appeared in such publications as African American Review, Callaloo, Guernica The Guardian, and Granta. She cites Toni Morrison (Song of Solomon), Gabriel García Márquez (One Hundred Years of Solitude), James Baldwin (Go Tell It on the Mountain), Edward P. Jones (Lost in the City), and Jhumpa Lahiri (Unaccustomed Earth) as inspirations. In 2017, Gyasi was chosen by Forbes for their "30 under 30 List".

In February 2020, Knopf published Gyasi's second book Transcendent Kingdom. The novel features characters from a short story that Gyasi published in Guernica magazine in 2015 entitled "Inscape." USA Today said "it's stealthily devastating", and The Vox, Chicago Review of Books, and The New Republic also reviewed it favorably.

In 2021, Gyasi authored the short story "Bad Blood" to be featured in The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story. The story depicts a young black mother's hypochondria as an effect of the history of racism and discrimination in healthcare, citing the 1932 Tuskegee Syphilis Study.

Gyasi has been outspoken about her widespread recognition as a black author. In March 2021, she wrote an article in The Guardian about the resurgent popularity of Homegoing during the Black Lives Matter protests the previous summer. She wrote: "While I do devoutly believe in the power of literature to challenge, to deepen, to change, I also know that buying books by black authors is but a theoretical, grievously belated and utterly impoverished response to centuries of physical and emotional harm."

She is a 2026-2027 Fellow of the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library.

Awards 2016: National Book Critics Circle's John Leonard Award for Best First Book for Homegoing 2016: National Book Foundation's 5 Under 35 award 2017: American Book Award for Homegoing 2017: Granta Best of Young American Novelists 2017: PEN/Hemingway Award for Homegoing 2020: Vilcek Prize for Creative Promise in Literature, Vilcek Foundation 2021: Women's Prize for Fiction, shortlisted for Transcendent Kingdom 2023: Royal Society of Literature International Writer

Works Homegoing (2016) Transcendent Kingdom (2020) "Bad Blood" in The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story (2021)