A creative writing session with Ayanna Lloyd Banwo on how to infuse your writing with specificity drawn from lived experience interwoven with research and imagination.

Ayanna Lloyd Banwo 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 and 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 was named a 2024 Rising Star in UK writing by The National Centre for Writing and The British Council.

Supported by the British Council’s UK/Kenya Season 2025.