Nana Oforiatta Ayim is a writer, filmmaker and art historian.

She has written for publications like frieze, ArtNews, African Metropolitan Architecture, and New Daughters of Africa. Her first novel, The God Child, was published by Bloomsbury Publishing in 2019.

She has made several films, a cross of fiction, travel essay, and documentary, that have been shown at museums like The New Museum, Tate Modern, and LACMA.

She is a founder of the ANO Institute of Arts and Knowledge through which she has pioneered such projects as The Mobile Museum and The Pan-African Cultural Encyclopaedia; curating groundbreaking exhibitions such as Ghana’s first pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2019.

She is the recipient of various awards and honours, having been named one of the Apollo ’40 under 40’; one of 50 African Trailblazers by The Africa Report; one of 12 African women making history by in 2016 and one of 100 women “building infrastructure, both literally and metaphorically, for future generations in Africa and in the Diaspora” in 2020 by Okayafrica; and a Quartz Africa Innovator. She received the 2015 the Art & Technology Award from LACMA; the 2016 AIR Award, which “seeks to honour and celebrate extraordinary African artists who are committed to producing provocative, innovative and socially-engaging work”; the inaugural 2018 Soros Arts Fellowship, and was a 2018 Global South Visiting Fellow at Oxford University. She has been appointed to the Advisory Council of Oxford University, will be a MOMA Curatorial Leadership Fellow from March 2020, and a Principal Investigator for the Action for African Cultural Restitution from April 2020.

The God Child

“A moving, mesmerizing, and astoundingly original debut novel by one of the most exciting literary voices to emerge in recent years.

Maya is the only child of an expat Ghanaian couple based in Germany, where as the sole African girl in her school, the pressure is on her to succeed. While her father is taciturn and reserved, her mother-heir to a crumbling dynasty in Ghana-is glamorous and charismatic.

Maya is both in awe of and intimidated by her overbearing beauty and her ability to command a room, especially with tales of the family’s former glory that seem so far removed from Maya’s reality.

But when Maya’s mother adopts her god child, Kojo, his mission to heal their story begins to bring to Maya the sense of possibility and purpose she has longed for.

The God Child is a coming-of-age story about a young girl finding her freedom in the midst of familial, cultural, and political constraints. With a bracing combination of power and vulnerability, Ayim’s debut is about how families, and nations, overcome the limitations of the past through the cycles of generations.”