‘When We Were Birds’: the BFG interview with Ayanna Lloyd Banwo

Ayanna Lloyd Banwo is a writer from Trinidad and Tobago,. Her debut novel When We Were Birds places the reader in a slightly fictionalized version of the country, where magic and mundanity co-mingle as much as the living and the dead. Booker Prize-winning novelist Pat Barker writes of this debut: “Combining the richness of myth with razor-sharp observation of contemporary life, When We Were Birds marks the emergence of a distinctive and powerful voice.” Banwo spoke with me from London.