Yaa Gyasi

Biography

Yaa Gyasi was born in Ghana in 1989 and moved to the United States at age two when her family settled in Huntsville, Alabama. She grew up between two worlds — Ghanaian family culture and American Southern experience — an experience that directly shapes the novel's dual structure. She visited Cape Coast Castle as a child with her family, stood in the slave dungeons, and reportedly had the idea for the novel's structure on that visit: what if there were two women here, one in the castle, one in the dungeon, and I followed their families forward? She wrote the novel as a creative writing student at the Iowa Writers' Workshop and published it at age 26.

Yaa Gyasi at a glance