Kenya

How to Write About Africa gathers vivid, powerful essays and fiction by the late Kenyan icon. Its editor Achal Prabhala talks compiling it, a second posthumous book, and an uncompleted novel. “Much is made of what he did for other writers, but it was his own writing that did it for me,” he said.

The platform, founded and edited by the Kenyan writer, is building a conversation between Africa and the Black diaspora. It is his second venture after the defunct Enkare Review.

“I needed to write something that takes advantage of the rich nuances in my own culture,” said the Graywolf Press Africa Prize-winning author of The House of Rust.

The judges called the Kenyan author a “transformative figure in African Literature.”

For What Are Butterflies without Their Wings, written over six years by the Lolwe editor and Caine Prize finalist, has 14 stories.

The Caine Prize winner’s forthcoming book is “suffused with Kenyan folklore and myth.”

The revered Kenyan, who writes in Gikuyu, is also the prize’s first nominee as both author and translator of the same book.

“Everywhere else gets romanticised, what about Mombasa?” she said of her debut novel, forthcoming from Graywolf Press in October 2021.

The Kenyan writer tells us her motivations and approach to teaching writing.