Elizabeth-Irene Baitie
Elizabeth-Irene Baitie is the director of a medical laboratory in Ghana Called Patholab Medical Laboratory. She holds an MSc in Clinical Biochemistry with Molecular Biology from the University of Surrey, UK. “Working in a lab is about running tests and making discoveries,” she says. “Life is like that. You don’t realise who you are until you’re tested.” Her stories for children and young adults simultaneously tug at and thrill the heart. Her first children’s book, A Saint in Brown Sandals, won the Macmillan Writer’s Prize for Africa. Subsequent young adult novels— The Twelfth Heart, The Dorm Challenge, Rattling in the Closet, and The Lion’s Whisper— were awarded the Burt Award for African Young Adult Literature. She has had seven novels published to date and lives in vibrant Accra with her husband. They are parents to three largely grown-up children.
About Elizabeth-Irene Baitie
Even as a young child, I was a voracious reader. Stories enthralled me. By the age of seven, my dream was to create stories that would captivate young people just the same way the books I had read did.
I enjoyed my formal education, and in secondary school, English Literature was a natural favorite for me. To the surprise of at least a couple of my teachers, however, I veered away from Literature and instead studied Biochemistry with Chemistry at the University of Ghana, and then went on to earn an MSc in Clinical Biochemistry with Molecular Biology at the University of Surrey, UK.
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