Ayanna Lloyd Banwo | |
|---|---|
 Lloyd Banwo in 2023 | |
| Born | Trinidad and Tobago |
| Alma mater | University of the West Indies, BA University of East Anglia, MA |
| Notable awards |
|
Ayanna Lloyd Banwo is a Trinidadian writer. She was awarded the second prize for "Public Notice" in the 2016 Small Axe Literary Competition. [1] Her debut novel When We Were Birds (Hamish Hamilton) was released in 2022 and won the 2023 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature. [2]
Ayanna Lloyd Banwo was born in Trinidad and Tobago, where she has said she was "made into a writer", [3] and currently lives in London, England. [4]
Speaking on her childhood, she has said: "I grew up in a family where we always told stories and we were always readers. My grandfather only gave my cousins and me books for Christmas." [5] Before becoming an author, she worked several jobs involving writing, including corporate communications, advertising, as an English and literature teacher for 10 years, and also as a freelance writer for newspapers. [5]
In 2005, she graduated from the University of the West Indies (UWI) with a degree in literatures in English, and a minor in history. [5] She has said, "I might not have become a writer if I hadn't gone to UWI." [6]
Following the deaths of her mother, father and grandmother between 2013 and 2015, she decided to take writing seriously as a career. Speaking on the influence of these deaths on her writing, she has said: "I've promised my dead three books. It is a pact that I've made with people who are not here anymore." [7] Her first short story was published in 2014. [5]
She has taken part in the St. James Writer's Workshop with Monique Roffey and the Cropper Foundation Residential Workshop with Funso Aiyejina and Merle Hodge, [8] and Mentoring with the Masters Workshop with Earl Lovelace in 2014, and the Callaloo Creative Writing Workshop in 2016.
She received a full tuition scholarship to the University of East Anglia's creative writing master's programme in 2017, completing her studies with financial aid from GoFundMe donors and a benefactor who took interest in her work. [7] Lloyd Banwo now holds an MA in Creative Writing from the University of East Anglia, where she is currently completing a PhD in Creative and Critical Writing. [9]
She has been featured in the "Who's Next?" segment for emerging writers at the Bocas Lit Fest and Bocas South. [8] Since 2016, she has served as consulting fiction editor for Moko magazine. [9]
She had her first publication in The Caribbean Writer with "Nightwalking" and her work has appeared in other publications, including Moko Magazine, Small Axe, POUi, PREE, Callaloo and Anomaly.[ citation needed ]
She is one of 10 commissioned writers for the forthcoming Colonial Countryside: National Trust Houses Reimagined, [10] a child-led project exploring the colonial history of 11 National Trust properties. [11] She has recorded a reading of her work "The Shadow Man" and answered questions on her contribution to the project for The Commissioned Writer's Podcast. [12]
Her first novel, When We Were Birds, was published in February 2022 by Hamish Hamilton. [13]
She is currently working on her second novel. Speaking to The Observer , she has said: "The novel looks at a house that has been passed down through five generations of women, and the protagonist has returned home to inherit this house. She’s going to sell it off because her life is not in Trinidad anymore and then finds that she can’t for various mysterious, supernatural reasons. It tracks a relationship with a house that doesn’t want to be parted from her." [14] Addressing her work's connection to Trinidad, she has said: “I think that my sensibility for story has always been indigenous Caribbean cadence, whether how a character speaks, how a story might unfold, or the kinds of things you might find [in the plot]." [7]
In 2014, she was shortlisted for the Wasafari New Writing Prize for "Walking in Lapeyrouse". [15] In the same year, she was shortlisted for the Small Axe Literary Competition, where she received second prize for her short story "Public Notice" in 2016. [16]
When We Were Birds featured in several lists of the most-anticipated novels of 2022, including The Irish Times [17] and The New Statesman . [18] She featured in The Observer 's list of the 10 best debut novelists of 2022. [14] Author Marlon James described the book as "A searing symphony of magic and loss, love and hope", [13] while Kirkus Reviews praised the novel's "unique world expansive enough to contain a ghost story, a love story, a mysterious mythology, and a thoughtful examination of how family bonds keep us firmly rooted to our pasts." [19] The novel was the overall winner of the 2023 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature. [20] It was shortlisted for the 2023 Jhalak Prize. [21]
She won the 2023 Eccles Centre & Hay Festival Writer's award, together with Jarred McGinnis. [22]
Tessa McWatt FRSL is a Guyanese-born Canadian writer. She has written seven novels and is a creative writing professor at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, United Kingdom. In 2021 she was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.
Olive Marjorie Senior is a Jamaican poet, novelist, short story and non-fiction writer based in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. She was awarded the Musgrave Gold Medal in 2005 by the Institute of Jamaica for her contributions to literature. Other awards she has won include the OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature. Senior was appointed Poet Laureate of Jamaica in 2021, serving in the post until 2024.
Earl Wilbert Lovelace is a Trinidadian novelist, journalist, playwright, and short story writer. He is particularly recognized for his descriptive, dramatic fiction on Trinidadian culture: "Using Trinidadian dialect patterns and standard English, he probes the paradoxes often inherent in social change as well as the clash between rural and urban cultures." As Bernardine Evaristo notes, "Lovelace is unusual among celebrated Caribbean writers in that he has always lived in Trinidad. Most writers leave to find support for their literary endeavours elsewhere and this, arguably, shapes the literature, especially after long periods of exile. But Lovelace's fiction is deeply embedded in Trinidadian society and is written from the perspective of one whose ties to his homeland have never been broken."
Anthony Joseph FRSL is a British/Trinidadian poet, novelist, musician and academic. In 2023, he was awarded the T. S. Eliot Prize for his book Sonnets for Albert.
Ira Mathur is an Indian-born Trinidad and Tobago multimedia freelance journalist, Sunday Guardian columnist and writer. The longest-running columnist for the Sunday Guardian, she has been writing an op-ed for the paper since 1995, except for a hiatus from 2003 to 2004 when she wrote for the Daily Express. She has written more than eight hundred columns on politics, economics, social, health and developmental issues, locally, regionally and internationally.
Monique Pauline Roffey is a Trinidadian-born British writer and memoirist. Her novels have been much acclaimed, winning awards including the 2013 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature, for Archipelago, and the Costa Book of the Year award, for The Mermaid of Black Conch in 2021.
Marina Salandy-Brown FRSA, Hon. FRSL, is a Trinidadian journalist, broadcaster and cultural activist. She was formerly an editor and Senior Manager in Radio and News and Current Affairs programmes with the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) in London, one of the BBC's few top executives from an ethnic minority background. She is the founder and inaugural director of the NGC Bocas Lit Fest, held annually in Trinidad and Tobago since 2011, "the biggest literary festival in the Anglophone Caribbean", and of the OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature. She was also co-founder of the Hollick Arvon Caribbean Writers Prize.
Tiphanie Yanique from Saint Thomas, U.S. Virgin Islands, is a Caribbean American fiction writer, poet and essayist who lives in New York. In 2010 the National Book Foundation named her a "5 Under 35" honoree. She also teaches creative writing, currently based at Emory University.
Vladimir Lucien is a writer, critic and actor from St. Lucia. His first collection of poetry, Sounding Ground (2014), won the Caribbean region's major literary prize for anglophone literature, the OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature, in 2015, making Lucien the youngest ever winner of the prize.
Barbara Jenkins is a Trinidadian writer, whose work since 2010 has won several international prizes, including the Commonwealth Short Story Prize and the Wasafiri New Writing Prize.
Marjorie Ruth Thorpe is a Trinidadian academic, lecturer, former diplomat and the first woman to have chaired the Public Service Commission (PSC) in Trinidad and Tobago. She is also a development practitioner with a particular interest in gender issues.
Joanne C. Hillhouse is a creative writer, journalist, producer and educator from Antigua and Barbuda. Her writing encompasses novels, short stories, poetry and children's books, and she has contributed to many publications in the Caribbean region as well as internationally, among them the anthologies Pepperpot (2014) and New Daughters of Africa (2019). Hillhouse's books include the poetry collection On Becoming (2003), the novellas The Boy from Willow Bend (2003) and Dancing Nude in the Moonlight (2004), the children's books Fish Outta Water and With Grace, the novel Oh Gad! (2012), and the young adult novel Musical Youth (2014), which was runner-up for the Burt Award for Caribbean Literature. She was named by Literary Hub as one of "10 Female Caribbean Authors You Should Know". An advocate for the development of the arts in Antigua and Barbuda, she founded the Wadadli Youth Pen Prize in 2004.
Susheila Nasta, MBE, Hon. FRSL, is a British critic, editor, academic and literary activist. She is Professor of Modern and Contemporary Literatures at Queen Mary University of London, and founding editor of Wasafiri, the UK's leading magazine for international contemporary writing. She is a recipient of the Benson Medal from the Royal Society of Literature.
Kerry Young is a British writer, born in Jamaica. She is the author of three well received and interlinked novels: Pao (2011), Gloria (2013) and Show Me a Mountain (2016).
Elizabeth Walcott-Hackshaw is a Trinidadian writer and academic, who is Professor of French Literature and Creative Writing at the University of the West Indies. Her writing encompasses both scholarly and creative work, and she has also co-edited several books. Walcott-Hackshaw is the daughter of Nobel Prize laureate Derek Walcott.
Lisa Allen-Agostini is a Trinidadian journalist, editor and writer of fiction, poetry and drama. She is also a stand-up comedian, performing as "Just Lisa".
Kevin Jared Hosein is a Caribbean novelist and short-story writer from Trinidad and Tobago. He is known for winning the 2018 Commonwealth Short Story Prize with his story "Passage". He also won the regional (Caribbean) section of the prize in 2015, with "The King of Settlement 4".
Sharon Millar is a Trinidadian writer. She was awarded the Commonwealth Short Story Prize in 2013 for "The Whale House".
Shivanee Ramlochan is a Trinidadian poet, arts reporter and blogger. Her first collection of poems Everyone Knows I Am a Haunting was shortlisted for the 2018 Felix Dennis Prize for best first collection.
Jane Bryce is a British writer, journalist, literary and cultural critic, as well as an academic. She was born and raised in Tanzania, has lived in Italy, the UK and Nigeria, and since 1992 has been based in Barbados. Her writing for a wide range of publications has focused on contemporary African and Caribbean fiction, postcolonial cinema and creative writing, and she is Professor Emerita of African Literature and Cinema at the University of the West Indies, Cave Hill.