Taiye Selasi

Creator of Afropolitanism and chosen by Granta literary magazine to form part of the volume with the best US short stories (2013), she is one of the latest incorporations to the Wylie Agency.

Taiye Selasi. © Nancy Crampton, 2010

Born in London in 1979 and raised in Massachusetts, of Nigerian and Ghanaian origin, Taiye Selasi is a writer, photographer and filmmaker. She has a degree in American Studies from Yale University and earned her master’s degree in International Relations from Oxford University.

In 2005 she published her seminal essay Bye-Bye, Babar (Or: What is an Afropolitan?) (LIP Magazine, 2005), offering an alternative view of African identity for transnational generations. In 2011 she made her fictional debut with the short story The Sex Lives of African Girls (Granta, 2011), selected for Best American Short Stories 2012 (Mariner Books, 2012). In 2013 she published her first novel, Ghana Must Go (Penguin Press, 2013), which made the bestseller list of The New York Times and the 10 Best Books of 2013 of The Wall Street Journal and The Economist.

With director Teddy Goitom of Stocktown Films, Selasi is executive producer of AFRIPEDIA, a six-part documentary about African creatives. With producers Fernando Meirelles and Hank Levine, she is working on EXODUS, a documentary about global migration.

@taiyeselasi

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