Kenyan author and journalist Binyavanga Wainaina‘s debut novel and memoir “One Day I Will Write About This Place” takes you through his middleclass Kenyan childhood, his winning of the Caine prize for African literature and his time in Uganda and South Africa.

The book is a coming-of-age memoir about disappointment, changing aspirations and familial, if not romantic, love. Dancing with elastic English through exuberant dialogue across languages – Sheng, Gikuyu, Pokot, Lingala – Wainaina shows us how his own vocabulary has formed and evolved. Ultimately this takes him back again and again to his childhood in Nakuru, to his family – “as solid as fiction” – and the worlds their lives contain.

Binyavanga Wainaina was born in 1971 in Nakuru in Rift Valley province.

He spent his school years in Kenya and later studied commerce at the University of Transkei in South Africa.

In July 2002 he won the Caine Prize for African Writing for his short story “Discovering Home”.  Since then critics have eagerly anticipated his first book-length publication. But he had more pressing plans. He returned to Kenya, co-founded the ground-breaking literary magazine Kwani?, and later became director of the Chinua Achebe Center for African Writers and Artists at Bard College, New York.

In 2003, Wainaina was given an award by the Kenya Publisher’s Association, in recognition of his services to Kenyan literature.

First published in 2005, Wainaina’s satirical article “How to Write About Africa“ attracted wide attention.  It started off as an angry email to the editor of Granta, literary magazine and publisher in the UK,  but became the most read article in the magazine’s history.

He instructs the would-be author to focus on conflict, starvation, the primordial, rolling grasslands, graphic illnesses, dictatorships and beautiful sunsets. With no small dose of irony, it has become a popular set reading for university students.

Wainaina has written for The EastAfrican, National Geographic, The Sunday Times (South Africa), Granta, The New York Times, Chimurenga magazine and The Guardian (UK).

Via: The Independent