Yaa Gyasi
Yaa Gyasi was born in Mampong, Ghana, in 1989, and moved to the United States at the age of two when her father accepted a professorship at the University of Illinois. She grew up in Huntsville, Alabama, where her experience of the American South — its history of slavery and racial violence, its complex relationship with the Africa her family had come from — became one of the shaping experiences of her literary imagination. She attended Stanford University, where she studied English and creative writing, and earned her MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. It was during a college trip to Ghana, when she visited Cape Coast Castle — one of the principal departure points of the Atlantic slave trade — that she conceived the ambition of the novel she would spend six years writing.
Gyasi’s debut novel, Homegoing, published in 2016, is a work of breathtaking structural ambition. It traces two branches of a Ghanaian family — one that remained in Africa, one that was enslaved and taken to America — through eight generations, from the mid-eighteenth century to the present day, with each chapter focusing on a single member of a new generation. The novel’s structure is deliberately architectural: each chapter is complete in itself, each character fully realized in a limited space, and yet the cumulative effect of reading the whole is of a vast historical panorama in which the individual stories accumulate into something that feels both epic and intimate.
The novel tracks the consequences of the slave trade and colonialism across time with meticulous research and genuine emotional honesty, following the American branch through slavery, the Civil War, Reconstruction, the Great Migration, the Harlem Renaissance, the drug epidemic of the 1980s, and into the present, while following the Ghanaian branch through the Fante-Asante conflicts, British colonialism, and postcolonial independence. Homegoing won the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Fiction, the National Book Critics Circle’s John Leonard Prize, and the Heartland Prize, and was a finalist for numerous other awards. It became a bestseller and established Gyasi immediately as one of the most significant new voices in American fiction.
Gyasi’s prose style is lucid and controlled, with an ability to establish character and place rapidly that is essential to a novel covering two and a half centuries in roughly three hundred pages. She writes with historical precision and emotional directness, never allowing the architectural ambition of her structure to overwhelm the humanity of her individual characters. Each chapter reads with the compression and intensity of a first-rate short story while contributing to the larger design.
Yaa Gyasi’s second novel, Transcendent Kingdom (2020), demonstrated her range and maturity: a more intimate work focusing on a Ghanaian American neuroscience researcher processing her brother’s death from opioid addiction and her mother’s depression. Together, her two novels establish her as a writer of genuine seriousness and originality, and Homegoing in particular has already achieved the status of a contemporary classic of African American literature.
