With her Nena Knight trilogy, Yasmin Angoe carved out a space for a protagonist rarely seen in action-packed fiction: a Ghanaian Black woman who’s as lethal as she is layered.
Across Her Name Is Knight, They Come at Knight, and the trilogy’s final installment, It Ends with Knight, Angoe redefined what it means to be a badass female lead, blending action, vengeance, and deep emotional resonance into stories that keep readers breathless.
For Angoe, Nena Knight was never just another assassin. She was a character with a past that demanded to be told. Stolen from her Ghanaian village as a child, Nena was shaped by trauma, honed by discipline, and fueled by a hunger for justice. But the true magic of Angoe’s storytelling is that while Nena is a highly trained killer, she is also unmistakably human. She questions. She doubts. She evolves. In a genre often dominated by men with guns and a singular purpose, Nena is complex, driven by more than just revenge—she’s searching for identity, belonging, and maybe even redemption.
It’s that depth that has captivated readers, and Angoe is keenly aware of why her character resonates. “There are jobs out there that we all don’t like, but someone does them because it needs to be done,” Angoe says. “The reader gets to learn how she became an assassin, and most of all why. It’s the why that makes an unlikeable thing like being an assassin understandable.”
Angoe’s writing process is anything but silent. Unlike some authors who retreat into solitude, Angoe thrives on background noise—TV shows, music, even random series playing in the background while she writes. The hum of life around her fuels her creativity, a method that clearly works given the success of her books.
That success isn’t stopping at the page. With a TV adaptation in development, Angoe’s world is poised to expand beyond the literary realm. While she remains tight-lipped on the details, she’s excited to see how Nena’s story translates to the screen. And if Hollywood gets it right, new audiences will be introduced to a character who challenges—and changes—the way we see women in thrillers.
But make no mistake—Angoe didn’t just stumble into this career. Her journey to becoming a published author was one of perseverance. Balancing a full-time job in education with the demands of family, she wrote when she could—late nights, weekends, stolen moments in between responsibilities. The result? A debut novel, Her Name Is Knight, that exploded onto the scene, followed by two equally gripping sequels.
For Angoe, writing is about more than just telling a great story. It’s about representation. “I wanted to put a character I rarely see as the main character in those kinds of books,” she says. “A character who I and other readers like me could see themselves in.”
With the trilogy now complete, fans may be mourning the end of Nena Knight’s journey, but Angoe is far from done. With her newest domestic thriller, Not What She Seems, already on shelves, one thing is certain—whatever Yasmin Angoe writes next will be bold, unflinching, and impossible to put down.
