Two half-sisters are born in eighteenth-century Gold Coast. One marries a British slaver and lives in Cape Coast Castle; the other is imprisoned in its dungeons and shipped to America. From that split, Yaa Gyasi built Homegoing, one of the most acclaimed debut novels of the decade.
Mampong
Gyasi was born in 1989 in Mampong, Ghana. Her mother, Sophia, is a nurse, and her father, Kwaku Gyasi, became a professor of French at the University of Alabama in Huntsville.
Growing up in America
The family lived in Illinois and Tennessee before settling in Huntsville, Alabama, when she was ten. She has spoken about feeling between cultures as a child.
Education
She earned a Bachelor of Arts in English from Stanford University and a Master of Fine Arts from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.
The idea
A trip to Ghana, including a visit to Cape Coast Castle, helped inspire Homegoing. She began writing it while working at a tech start-up in San Francisco after Stanford.
Homegoing
Published in 2016, the novel follows the descendants of the half-sisters, Effia and Esi, one chapter per generation, from the Gold Coast to the plantations and cities of America.
Prizes
At 26, Gyasi won the National Book Critics Circle’s John Leonard Award for Best First Book and the PEN/Hemingway Award for Debut Novel. She was named one of the National Book Foundation’s 5 Under 35 in 2016 and won the 2017 American Book Award.
Transcendent Kingdom
Her second novel, Transcendent Kingdom, published in 2020, tells of Gifty, the daughter of Ghanaian immigrants in Alabama, a neuroscientist grappling with her brother’s addiction and her mother’s depression.
Themes
Her work explores lineage, generational trauma, faith, and Black and African identities. Both novels ask how the past shapes families long after events are forgotten.
Readers in Ghana
Homegoing is widely read in Ghana, where many readers were moved by its portrayal of Asante and Fante history and the slave trade from an African perspective.
The structure
Each chapter of Homegoing follows a single descendant, alternating between the two family lines. Readers meet a new character every chapter, which lets the novel cover three centuries while staying close to individual lives.
One castle, two fates
Cape Coast Castle has upper rooms and dark dungeons in the same walls. Gyasi’s novel starts from that contrast, and it leaves readers with the sense that the descendants of both floors are still living with what happened there.
