In 2012, Ayanna Lloyd Banwo was a young writer searching for an outlet. Finding kinship and enlightenment among kindred spirits, she has also found her voice–fresh, compelling, uniquely Trinidadian!
Set to release her debut novel, When We Were Birds (Hamish Hamilton) on February 10, Lloyd Banwo has been deemed by the UK Guardian’s Observer one of its ten best first-time novelists of 2022. Others like recognised writer and her former teacher Monique Roffey hails her as “a rising star.”
“I was made into a writer in Trinidad,” the London-based Lloyd Banwo told Sunday Guardian in an interview last Wednesday.
“It was Bocas, it was the Cropper Foundation workshop, Monique Roffey’s workshop, mentoring with the Masters with Earl Lovelace, the community of writers in Trinidad. Every step along your journey is important.”
Her humility showed as she traced the literary readings, discussions with famous and emerging writers, workshops and other programmes in the literary community that helped nurture her talent.
Apart from her recent recognition, a high point in the 41-year-old’s journey was reading her work in public for the first time at Bocas Lit Fest in 2014. To top it off, there were writers she admired in the audience.
Being awarded a full-tuition scholarship in 2017 to do her Masters at the University of East Anglia (UEA), one of the oldest and one of the most prestigious creative writing programmes, was another highlight for the promising novelist. The literary community, family and friends would rally around her to cover living expenses.
Ayanna Lloyd Banwo's first novel, When We Were Birds, has been named one of the best debut novels of 2022 by the UK Observer.
“Bocas was instrumental again in finding a very generous donor and I also had a ‘GoFundMe’. That was a high point, the fact that the community believes in you.
“Bocas could ask me for anything except my firstborn,” she laughed, confirming sentiments expressed to this newspaper the day before by incoming Festival and Programme Director of Bocas Lit Fest, Nicholas Laughlin, on her keen sense of community. Laughlin described her as “very down-to-earth, very bright, clearly imaginative” and “one of the most exciting new talents” he has observed in recent years.
Some of Lloyd Banwo’s influences are famed writers, Earl Lovelace, Olive Senior, Toni Morrison and Arundhati Roy. In addition to Roffey, she benefitted from the tutelage of writer and retired UWI lecturer Merle Hodge, and poet and academic Funso Aiyejina, and spent time with other emerging Trinbagonian writers, including Alake Pilgrim, Shivanee Ramlochan, Jannine Horsford and Hadassah Williams.
“Certainly for me the community of women that I was writing with was really instrumental, not just being taught by people who were already established, but also by my cohorts, my fellow writers who were also learning and just trying to be better writers was really important,” she said.
Perhaps most instructive, however, were the stories her grandmother Yolande Granderson told about her own life growing up in Belmont, and about her children and the family.
Lloyd Banwo’s maternal grandparents, then public servants, moved to Diego Martin in the 1960s, but Belmont, the hometown of generations of women on her mother’s side, was significant in shaping her.
With her aunt, Lorraine, a teacher at her former primary school, Diamond Vale Primary, it was easy for Lloyd Banwo and her cousins to pile into Lorraine’s car and go from school to their grandmother’s home about eight minutes away.
“My grandmother was a great reader, so was my grandfather, Albert Granderson and father Ronald Lloyd– the whole family really–so they always bought us books. My aunt was into music, so it meant that our childhood was also full of music. We used to play the steelpan. Lorraine and my mother, Gale, taught piano. So that was my childhood, a lot of books, a lot of family time, a lot of music and a lot of stories.”
By the time Lloyd Banwo entered secondary school at Bishop Anstey in Port-of-Spain, she was developing a penchant for writing.
“I loved English. English and History, they were always my favourite subjects. If the teacher said write an essay about a particular topic and everybody else groaned, I was happy.”
Former classmates would tell her later that they always knew she would be a writer, but Lloyd Banwo confessed that back then, she was not so sure.
“I always liked writing. I always loved reading. People ask me: ‘when did you decide to be a writer?’ That was very late. I didn’t know how to start to be a ‘writer’. I just knew I liked to write. I didn’t know how you met a publisher or other writers to talk to.”
A Bocas Lit Fest ad kindled her interest in 2012, a year after the vibrant celebration of the region’s premier literary minds started, charting her on an ascendant course. Coming face to face with life’s fragility after losing her mother, father and grandmother within the space of three years, the UWI graduate resolved to pursue her dream to study abroad for a Masters in Creative Writing.
“The period between 2012/2013 and 2016–as much as it was the time when I was writing, growing a lot– was very difficult.
“I was an adult, but nobody is ready to lose their parents. It’s tough. It was very destabilising.”
Out of her turmoil, Lloyd Banwo birthed When We Were Birds, a timeless, emotive novel about love, ghosts, loss and renewal.
Set in contemporary Trinidad, the highly anticipated work transcends the natural, taking readers on a riveting journey that masterfully shifts between everyday life and the mythical.
Lloyd Banwo draws on Caribbean perspectives on death, contemplating ancestral connections and reverence for the dead versus dissociation from the dead through her protagonists, Yejide and Darwin.
“The idea of my ancestors being on a plane I can access that I have to pay homage to, that I think about, that I can gain inspiration from, protection from, is very important to me and I would say it shaped a lot of the spiritual basis of this novel.”
Yejide, whose dying mother imparts in her the power to commune with the dead, is destined to meet down-on-his-luck gravedigger Darwin, who shows up in Port Angeles hoping to find the father he never met. Spiritually intertwined, the two must overcome adversity to discover transformative love.
Lloyd Banwo, too, has seen redemption in her personal life in the aftermath of her deep loss. Shrugging off the weight of a gruelling pandemic, she got married in April last year.
“I had to seize love, I had to hold on to that,” she shared, encouraging others to cherish each other in these uncertain times.
To creatives who are yet to realise their dreams, she advised: “Find your tribe, your community. You can only cultivate a voice by consuming and surrounding yourself with the greatest art and people that you can access.”
Lloyd Banwo has been published in Moko Magazine, Small Axe and PREE and shortlisted for the Small Axe Literary Competition and the Wasafiri New Writing Prize. She is currently working on her second novel which is set in the same world as her first and focuses on an inherited house that refuses to be sold.
When We Were Birds will be available next month at Paper Based Book Shop in St Ann’s, Tales N Treasures in St James, and on Amazon.
