One Day I Will Write About This Place
Date: Wednesday 26th October, 6:30-8:30pm
Venue: Brunei Gallery Suite, SOAS, LONDON
Book launch with author Binyavanga Wainaina, Kibny’Aanko Seroney (broadcast journalist, Kass FM) and Dr Wangui wa Goro (author & translator).
In this classic of African autobiography for a new generation, Wainaina takes us through his school days, his failed attempt to study in South Africa, a moving family reunion in Uganda, and his travels around Kenya.
The landscape in front of him always claims his main attention, but he also evokes the shifting political scene that unsettles his views on family, tribe, and nationhood. Throughout, reading is the author’s refuge and his solace. When, in 2002, a writing prize comes through, the door is opened for him to pursue the career that perhaps had been beckoning all along.
“Binyavanga Wainaina is a singer and a painter in words…The memoir bursts with life and laughter and pathos in every line and paragraph.”
Ngugi wa Thiong’o, author of Wizard of the Crow
Binyavanga Wainaina was born in Nakuru, Kenya in 1971. He is the founding editor of Kwani?, a leading African literary magazine based in Kenya.
He won the 2002 Caine Prize for African Writing and has written for Vanity Fair, Virginia Quarterly, Granta, and the New York Times.
Wainaina directs the Chinua Achebe Center for African Writers and Artists at Bard College in upstate New York.
Kibny’Aanko Seroney is a Kenyan broadcast journalist for Kass FM International London. He is also a lexicographer and author of the first ever Kalenjin dictionary and author of ‘From Strength to Strength’, a biography of Ambassador Peter Rono, an Olympic champion in 1988. Seroney produces and coordinates weekly radio programmes for Kass FM on key political, economic and social issues featuring interviews and commentary by an array of experts and scholars and by members of the Kenyan community.
Dr Wangui wa Goro has served as a public intellectual, translator, editor, writer, social and cultural catalyst and advocate, academic, researcher and campaigner for human rights in Africa and Europe in public, private and voluntary capacities over the last thirty years. She is the translator of award-winning authors including the Nobel Prize nominee Ngugi wa Thiong’o through whose work, Matigari, she broke new ground for a new generation of African translators. Wangui wa Goro is a writer in her own right too and writes poetry, short stories, fiction and non-fiction. Her first short story, Heaven and Earth (McMillan) has been taught on the Kenyan curriculum. Another, Deep Sea Fishing, is included in the award-winning anthology African Love Stories (Ayebia). Her book Global Feminist Politics, Identities in a Changing World, co-edited with Kelly Coate and Suki Ali and published by Routledge in 2001, has been significant in shaping debates about human rights, identity and location.
Source: RAS, Royal African Society
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