When We Were Birds is a combination of a love story, a ghost story and a crime story set in a fictional version of Trinidad and Tobago.
Its author, Trinidadian Ayanna Lloyd Banwo, has appeared on the cover of the Observer as one of its ten best debut novelists of 2022, and the book was named the Most Anticipated Book of 2022 by BuzzFeed and Essence Magazine.
The Observer said, “It announces an important new voice in fiction, at once grounded and mythic in its scope and carried by an incantatory prose style that recalls Arundhati Roy’s hugely impactful debut, The God of Small Things (1997), which Lloyd Banwo cites as a major influence.”
Based in London, Lloyd Banwo, 41, told WMN the interest in her debut novel has been both surprising and gratifying, since one never knows how people would respond to their work.
[caption id="attachment_935890" align="alignnone" width="768"] When we were Birds author, Ayanna Lloyd Banwo says she grew up in a family where stories were always told. -[/caption]
“The only thing you can do is focus on the work you want to do and hope you get enough opportunities to continue to do it. Because it’s not about one book. The hope is to have a long career writing and being able to tell the kind of stories I want to tell.”
So she hopes readers will like her future books and that they live up to the hype.
“All of this is nice, all of this is lovely, but at the end of the day, the process is still the same. Being on the cover of the Observer doesn’t make it any easier. I still have to do the same thing I did three or four years ago.
"So I try not to think about it too much. I try to stay grounded and focused.”
When We Were Birds is the story of Darwin and Yejide, two people from different backgrounds who find each other in an ancient cemetery and fall in love.
Darwin is a down-on-his-luck gravedigger who recently arrived in the city of Port Angeles. He was raised as a Rastafari and never dealt with death, as, to him, death was not something to dwell on, but part of life. Meanwhile, Yejide’s mother is dying and is leaving behind a legacy that now passes to Yejide – the power to talk to the dead.
Both trouble and destiny await them.
“At its core it’s a story about grief and the different traditions people have dealing with death. It’s a story of loving, having the power to heal and to give redemption in the light of that grief.”
Lloyd Banwo describes her work as magical realism as opposed to the high fantasy of books like the Lord of the Rings series.
“Think about how we live in Trinidad. We are superstitious people. We believe in signs and your granny would tell you not to pick fruit from a certain tree after a certain time.
[caption id="attachment_935889" align="alignnone" width="635"] When we were Birds, the debut novel by Trinidadian author Ayanna Lloyd Banwo. -[/caption]
“And while we are very modern now and these things seem silly, they are part of our ancestral traditions t
