Magical Realism Darwin is a down-on-his-luck gravedigger, newly arrived in the Trinidadian city of Port Angeles to seek his fortune, The women of Yejide's family are human but also not - descended from corbeau, the black birds that fly east at sunset, taking with them the souls of the dead. Darwin and Yejide both have something that the other needs. Their destinies are intertwined... Penguin UK Trade Paperback
'A searing symphony of magic and loss, love and hope... This book just might heal you' Marlon James
Darwin is a down-on-his-luck gravedigger, newly arrived in the Trinidadian city of Port Angeles to seek his fortune, young and beautiful and lost. Estranged from his mother and the Rastafari faith she taught him, he is convinced that the father he never met may be waiting for him somewhere amid these bustling streets.
Meanwhile in an old house on a hill, where the city meets the rainforest, Yejide's mother is dying. And she is leaving behind a legacy that now passes to Yejide: the power to talk to the dead. The women of Yejide's family are human but also not - descended from corbeau, the black birds that fly east at sunset, taking with them the souls of the dead.
Darwin and Yejide both have something that the other needs. Their destinies are intertwined, and they will find one another in the sprawling, ancient cemetery at the heart of the island, where trouble is brewing...
Recommended Read for 2022 in the Observer, New Statesman, Irish Times, Buzzfeed, Good Housekeeping, The Daily Nerd, Essence and more
'BELIEVE THE HYPE' Stella, Sunday Telegraph
Ayanna Lloyd Banwo is a writer from Trinidad & Tobago. She is a graduate of the University of the West Indies and holds an MA in Creative Writing from the University of East Anglia, where she is now a Creative and Critical Writing PhD candidate. Her work has been published in Moko Magazine, Small Axe and PREE, among others, and shortlisted for Small Axe Literary Competition and the Wasafiri New Writing Prize. When We Were Birds is her first novel; she is now working on her second which will be published by Hamish Hamilton in 2025. Ayanna lives with her husband in London.
It’s not often a debut novel wins comparisons to a release as momentous as Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things, but Ayanna Lloyd Banwo’s atmospheric When We Were Birds has done just that. “It’s about two young outsiders: Darwin, who has recently become a gravedigger, and Yejide, who will inherit a family's affinity with the dead,” says the writer, who is from Trinidad & Tobago. “They're connected to the dead as much as they are connected to each other and find that their lives and the lives of the whole city – the living and the dead – intertwined with their love story.”
The 41-year-old moved to the UK to study creative writing, and while she started the novel in 2018, she didn’t land a publisher until 2020, while she was separated from her partner by the pandemic (she was in Norfolk; he was in London). “It was extremely odd. We wanted to celebrate but we didn’t feel comfortable getting on the train, so I just sat in my flat and had a cup of tea!”
How did you get the idea for your book?
I had a lot of deaths in my family. I lost my mum, my dad and a grandmother over three years, as well as having my own illness. I spent maybe four to five years in hospitals, morgues and cemeteries really consumed not just by grief, but the work of death. I thought about who does that work and how; the fact death and dying is a very spiritual, psychological and intense experience, but also a very everyday, prosaic, mundane experience. I always liked cemeteries also; I’ve always been interested in them. There’s one in Port of Spain where probably everybody in my maternal line is buried, so it's a family archive.
Which writer do you most admire and why?
Now I’ve suddenly become an immigrant writer, I've been re-reading Create Dangerously: The Immigrant at Work by Edwidge Danticat. The immigrant story, particularly for writers or artists, is often about someone who has spent a longer period of time outside of where they grew up, caught between two cultures. But for me, I was fully formed [when I arrived in the UK], so I still don't feel like an immigrant; I feel like somebody who happened to be here to do school. So I found that book to be pretty grounding.
What’s your most surprising passion or hobby?
I like a pub. I like a pint. That's something that I've enjoyed a lot being in England. I like an old pub with the same old husband and wife that sit at that table in the corner. I like a nice roast. I found it very surprising how much I enjoyed something that was very different in my head. I just find them very warm and comfortable. I like writing in pubs also; I’ll sit and take notes, just people-watching and no one tells you to leave, even if you haven't bought a pint for the last half hour.
