Ayesha Harruna Attah (born December 1983) is a Ghanaian-born fiction writer.[1][2] She lives in Senegal.[3]
Ayesha Harruna Attah was born in Accra, Ghana, in the 1980s, under a military government, to a mother who was a journalist and father who was a graphic designer.[4] Attah has said: "My parents were my first major influences. They ran a literary magazine called Imagine, which had stories about Accra; articles on art, science, film, books; cartoons—which I especially loved. They were (and still are) my heroes. I discovered Toni Morrison when I was thirteen, and I was hooked. I devoured everything she wrote. I remember reading Paradise, and while its meaning completely evaded me then, I was left feeling like it was the most amazing book written and that one day I wanted to write a world full of strong female characters, just like Ms. Morrison had done."[5]
After growing up in Accra, she moved to Massachusetts and studied biochemistry at Mount Holyoke College,[3][6] and then earned her master's degree in magazine journalism at the Columbia University,[7] and she received an MFA in creative writing at New York University.[8][9]
Attah has published five novels.[9] Her debut book Harmattan Rain (2008) was written as the result of a fellowship from Per Ankh Publishers — under the mentorship of Ghanaian novelist Ayi Kwei Armah — and TrustAfrica,[10] and was shortlisted for the 2010 Commonwealth Writers' Prize (Africa Region).[11] Her second novel Saturday's Shadows, published by World Editions[12] in 2015,[13] was nominated for the Kwani? Manuscript Project,[14] and has been published in Dutch (De Geus).[15] Her third novel is The Hundred Wells of Salaga (2019),[16] dealing with "relationships, desires and struggles in women’s lives in Ghana in the late 19th century during the scramble for Africa".[17] She has written The Deep Blue Between, a novel for young adults. Her fifth novel, the romantic comedy Zainab Takes New York, was released in April 2022.[18]
As a 2014 AIR Award laureate, Attah was a writer-in-residence at the Instituto Sacatar in Bahia, Brazil.[19] She also won a Miles Morland Foundation Writing Scholarship in 2016 for a proposed non-fiction book on the history of the kola nut.[20]
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