Yaa Gyasi

Yaa Gyasi is the richest Ghanaian author, with an estimated net worth of $2 million (estimated).

Yaa Gyasi's first novel, Homegoing, sold to Knopf for a seven-figure advance before she had turned 30. Published in 2016, it follows two half-sisters born in 18th-century Gold Coast, one married to a British slaver at Cape Coast Castle and the other sold into slavery below it, and the descendants of each across three centuries.

From Mampong to Huntsville

Gyasi was born in Mampong in 1989. Her family emigrated to the US in 1991, and from the age of ten she grew up in Huntsville, Alabama, where her father, Kwaku Gyasi, taught French at the University of Alabama in Huntsville and her mother, Sophia, worked as a nurse. After high school she studied English at Stanford, worked briefly for a San Francisco tech start-up, and in 2012 left to join the Iowa Writers' Workshop, where she earned an MFA.

Homegoing and Transcendent Kingdom

Homegoing took the PEN/Hemingway Award, an American Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle's John Leonard prize for a debut, and the National Book Foundation named her one of its "5 Under 35" in 2016. Her second novel, Transcendent Kingdom (2020), about a Ghanaian-American neuroscientist dealing with her brother's death from addiction and her mother's depression, was shortlisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction in 2021. Her story "Bad Blood" appeared in The 1619 Project in 2021.

Recognition

Granta named her one of the best young American novelists in 2017, the same year she made the Forbes 30 Under 30 list. She received the Vilcek Prize for Creative Promise in 2020 and was elected an international writer of the Royal Society of Literature in 2023. In 2026 she began a fellowship at the New York Public Library's Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers.