Date: Wednesday 26th October, 6:30-8:30pm
Venue: Brunei Gallery Suite, SOAS
Join us for this book launch with author Binyavanga Wainaina
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 tha...
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Date: Wednesday 26th October, 6:30-8:30pm
Venue: Brunei Gallery Suite, SOAS
Join us for this book launch with author Binyavanga Wainaina
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 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 BardCollege in upstate New York.
rsvp@royalafricansociety.org
'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
