Yaa Gyasi

Yaa Gyasi (2017)

Yaa Gyasi (born 1989 in Mampong , Ghana ) is a Ghanaian-American writer.

Life

Yaa Gyasi's parents come from the Ashanti region , the family emigrated to the USA in 1991, where the father found a job at a university after completing his doctorate as a linguist. The family lived in Ohio, Illinois, and Tennessee, and from the age of ten, Gyasi grew up in Huntsville , Alabama , where she felt the aftermath of American slavery in the social climate.

Gyasi studied at Stanford University (BA), worked in San Francisco and studied creative writing in the Iowa Writers' Workshop (MA) in 2012 .

For her first novel Homegoing , she was inspired by her first trip home to Ghana, which she undertook as an adult. There she toured Cape Coast Castle , which was used for the slave trade , and she took up the subject.

The novel traces the story of the descendants of a Ghanaian woman named Maame from the middle of the 18th century in Ghana over eight generations to the present day in the USA. Maame has two children, Effia and Esi, who grow up separately and each form two families. Only in the last generation are the two lines reunited with Marjorie and Marcus. The novel is divided into two large parts with chapters, each with the name of a descendant. The history of the two family lines is told alternately in chronological order.

Gyasi received various young talent awards for the novel, such as the John Leonard Prize of the National Book Critics Circle Award , a Hemingway Foundation PEN Award , the 5 Under 35 from the National Book Foundation , an American Book Award and one of the Dayton Literary Peace Prizes 2017.

Yaa Gyasi lives in Berkeley, California.

plant

• Homegoing . Alfred A. Knopf, New York 2016, ISBN 978-1-10194-713-5
  • Return home . Translation of Anette Grube. DuMont, Cologne 2017, ISBN 978-3-8321-9838-1 .

literature

• Alec Russell: The painful drumbeat of America . Interview, in: Financial Times , April 21, 2018, p. L&A 10
• Interview by Anne Haeming: The scar will be passed on to the next generation . In: Spiegel Online , September 29, 2017
• Isabel Wilkerson : Isabel Wilkerson Reviews Yaa Gyasi's 'Homegoing' , review, in: The New York Times, June 8, 2016

Web links

• Literature by and about Yaa Gyasi in the catalog of the German National Library
• Literature by and about Yaa Gyasi in the bibliographic database WorldCat
• Yaa Gyasi in the Internet Movie Database (English)
• Yaa Gyasi , at the International Literature Festival Berlin , 2017