One Day I Will Write About This Place

My review of the new memoir by Binyavanga Wainaina, author of the viral essay “How to Write About Africa,” is up at The Quarterly Conversation. Here’s a bit of it. Wainaina will be at the Brooklyn Book Festival tomorrow.

The Kenyan writer Binyavanga Wainaina is having a mixed-up career. A more typical author might publish a few novels, then found a literary magazine, win a prestigious award, publish his memoirs, and finally release a pungent essay describing how other authors should do their work.

Wainaina won the prestigious award first. In 2002, he was awarded the Caine Prize for African Writing for a piece called “Discovering Home.” Then he founded the magazine Kwani? (“so what?” in KiSwahili), which released its first issue in 2003. Next came the blistering essay “How to Write About Africa,” published in Granta in 2005. Now his first book has been published: not a novel, but a memoir called One Day I Will Write About This Place.