Ayesha Harruna Attah

Ayesha Harruna Attah is a Ghanaian-born fiction writer. Her debut novel, Harmattan Rain (2009), was nominated for the 2010 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize.

Ayesha Harruna Attah was born and raised in Accra. She moved to Massachusetts and attended Mount Holyoke College, Columbia University, and NYU. She has degrees in Biochemistry, Journalism, and Creative Writing.

Ayesha Harruna Attah authored five novels: Harmattan Rain; Saturday's Shadows, shortlisted for the Kwani? Manuscript Project in 2013; The Hundred Wells of Salaga, a finalist for the 2020 William Saroyan Prize; a young adult novel, The Deep Blue Between, selected as a 2021 The White Ravens book; and a rom-com Zainab Takes New York.

A 2015 Africa Centre Artists in Residency Award Laureate and Sacatar Fellow, she is the recipient of the 2016 Miles Morland Foundation Scholarship for non-fiction.

She is the 2023–2024 Literature Protégée for the Rolex Mentor & Protégé Arts Initiative and is being mentored by Bernardine Evaristo.

Ayesha Harruna Attah currently lives in Senegal.

Photo credit: © Elisse Fitte-Duval