Ayanna Lloyd Banwo

Ayanna Lloyd Banwo is a Trinidadian writer based in London who works in literary fiction with Caribbean settings and magical-realist elements. She graduated from the University of the West Indies in 2005 and worked as a teacher and in corporate communications before earning an MA in creative writing from the University of East Anglia, where she is also a doctoral candidate; she has served as a consulting fiction editor for Moko magazine since 2016. Her debut novel, When We Were Birds (2022), won the 2023 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature, the Authors' Club Best First Novel Award, the Goldsboro Books Glass Bell Award, and an American Book Award, and was shortlisted for the Jhalak Prize. She has said she wrote the novel in part to honor family members she lost between 2013 and 2015.