Ayanna Lloyd Banwo: 'When We Were Birds'

AYANNA LLOYD BANWO (b. 1980) is a writer from Trinidad and Tobago. Her debut novel ‘When We Were Birds’ was the 2023 winner of the OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature, the Author’s Club Best First Novel Award, the Goldsboro Books Glass Bell Award, and the American Book Award. It was also shortlisted for the Jhalak Prize, the Kitschies Golden Tentacle Award, the McKitterick Prize and named one of the UK Observer’s Best Debuts and The Economist’s Best Books of 2022. Her short fiction and non-fiction have been published in Moko Magazine, Small Axe and PREE, among others, and shortlisted for the Small Axe Literary Competition and the Wasafiri New Writing Prize. She is the 2023 winner of the Eccles Centre & Hay Festival Writer’s Award and is at work on her second novel. She currently lives in Norwich.

Dr Alysa Ghose is an anthropologist who examines the interplay of race, gender, kinship, sexuality, and nation in Cuba. Her research focuses span Afrodiasporic religious traditions, migration, and reproductive justice, specifically in Latin America and the Caribbean. At the School of Divinity, Alysa is a lecturer in Religion and Decolonisation and teaches several courses that highlight the above issues such as Approaches to Fieldwork, Race and Religiosity, Religion in the Black Atlantic, Theory and Method in Religious Studies and Global Indigenous Religions.