Taiye Selasi

In 2015, Selasi appeared as a Featured Author, leading a writing seminar, at the annual Iceland Writers Retreat in Reykjavik, Iceland. She is also a contributor to the anthology New Daughters of Africa (edited by Margaret Busby, 2019).

In 2013 Selasi was selected as one of Granta′s 20 Best Young British Writers and in 2014 named to the Hay Festival's Africa39 list of 39 Sub-Saharan African writers under the age of 40 "with the potential and talent to define trends in African literature."

Selasi collaborates frequently with fellow artists. In 2012 she partnered with architect David Adjaye to create the Gwangju River Reading Room, an open-air library erected in 2013 as part of the Gwangju Biennale's Folly II. With director Teddy Goitom, founder of Stocktown, Selasi is Executive Producer of Afripedia, a documentary series about urban African creatives. With producers Fernando Meirelles and Hank Levine (City of God), Selasi is developing Exodus, a feature documentary about global migration.

In 2010 Ann Godoff at Penguin Press bought Selasi's unfinished novel. Ghana Must Go was published in 2013. It was acclaimed by Diana Evans in The Guardian, Margaret Busby in The Independent, by The Economist, and by The Wall Street Journal. Selected as one of the 10 Best Books of 2013 by The Wall Street Journal and The Economist, it has been sold in 22 countries as of 2014.

In 2006 Morrison gave Selasi a one-year deadline; she wrote "The Sex Lives of African Girls" to meet it. The story, published by UK literary magazine Granta in 2011, appears in Best American Short Stories 2012.

In 2005 The LIP Magazine published "Bye-Bye, Babar (Or: What is an Afropolitan?)", Selasi's seminal text on Afropolitans. In "Bye Bye Babar", Selasi describes a new African diaspora; a broader mix that accepts its diversity: "Perhaps what most typifies the Afropolitan consciousness is the refusal to oversimplify; the effort to understand what is ailing in Africa alongside the desire to honor what is wonderful, unique." Selasi does not seek recognition as the originator of Afropolitanism, "She makes a point not to claim to have coined it, and she downplays her own role in the whole phenomenon that followed from it." The conversation of Afropolitanism did increase, following the essay, and this paved way for scholars like Simon Gikandi and Achille Mbembe to "further develop" the term, Afropolitan, into a widely known a used ideology. The same year she wrote the essay, she penned a play which was produced at a small theatre by Avery Willis, Toni Morrison's niece.

Taiye Selasi (born 2 November 1979) is a British-American writer and photographer. Of Nigerian and Ghanaian origin, she describes herself as a "local" of Accra, Berlin, New York and Rome.