Taiye Selasi

Taiye Selasi's debut novel, Ghana Must Go (2013), made the year's top-ten lists of The Economist and The Wall Street Journal and has been translated into more than 20 languages. Her 2005 essay "Bye-Bye, Babar" introduced the word "Afropolitan".

Background

Born in London, she grew up in Brookline near Boston. Her parents are Ghanaian surgeon and poet Dr Ladé Wosornu and Nigerian paediatrician Dr Juliette Tuakli. She graduated summa cum laude in American studies from Yale and took an MPhil in international relations at Oxford, where in 2005 she met her mentor, Toni Morrison.

Writing

Morrison gave her a one-year deadline in 2006, and the result was the story "The Sex Lives of African Girls", which Granta ran in 2011 and which was chosen for The Best American Short Stories 2012. In 2013 Granta named her one of the Best of Young British Novelists, and in 2014 she was picked for Africa39. Penguin Press, under Ann Godoff, published Ghana Must Go, and her story "Firstborn Immigrant Daughter" appeared in The New Yorker's fiction issue in 2026.

Ideas

In a widely shared 2015 TED talk she argued that people come from experiences rather than countries, coining the term "multi-local". She counts herself local to four cities: Accra, Rome, Lisbon and New York.