Taiye Selasi

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Taiye Selasi (born Taiye Tuakli on 2 November 1979) is a London-born American writer and photographer of Nigerian and Ghanaian descent. She grew up in Brookline, Massachusetts, and says she feels at home in Accra, Berlin, New York and Rome. She studied at Yale University (BA in American studies) and earned an MPhil in international relations from Oxford.

Selasi helped launch the idea of the Afropolitan with her 2005 essay Bye-Bye, Babar (Or: What is an Afropolitan?). She argues for a diasporic, nuanced view of Africa. Her first novel, Ghana Must Go (Penguin, 2013), received strong praise. She has published short fiction such as The Sex Lives of African Girls (Granta, 2011) and contributed to New Daughters of Africa (2019).

Beyond writing, Selasi has collaborated on art and design, including the Gwangju River Reading Room with architect David Adjaye. She runs a production company, Cocoa Content (founded 2019), to develop TV projects. In 2022 she published a children's book, Anansi and the Golden Pot, and in 2023 it was announced she is writing and executive-producing a Lagos-set comedy drama series, Victoria Island. She emphasizes choosing localities rather than countries and has spoken against pigeonholing African writers. Her twin sister is Yetsa Kehinde Tuakli, a physician in the United States. She married Dutch cinematographer David Claessen in 2013; the couple divorced in 2015. Her given name Taiye means "first twin" in Yoruba.