Oprah Magazine Praises New Memoir from Kenyan Writer and Bard College Achebe Center Director Binyavanga Wainaina

ANNANDALE-ON-HUDSON, N.Y.—This month, Graywolf Press will publish One Day I Will Write about This Place, a debut memoir from Binyavanga Wainaina, the celebrated Kenyan writer and director of the Chinua Achebe Center for African Writers and Artists at Bard College. Vanity Fair calls Wainaina “one of Kenya’s young literary stars,” and oprah.com’s Summer Reading List calls One Day “an astonishing, dreamy memoir.”

Wainaina is founding editor and publisher 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 Review, Granta, Harper’s, and the New York Times. He was born in Nakuru, Kenya, and studied commerce at the University of Transkei (now Walter Sisulu University) in the former Trasnkei Region of South Africa, after which he worked in Cape Town as a freelance food and travel writer. His other awards include the Virginia Quarterly Review’s Emily Clark Balch Prize for Short Fiction and a Lannan Foundation Fellowship.

The Chinua Achebe Center for African Writers and Artists was established in 2005 to further the legacy of Chinua Achebe, Charles P. Stevenson Jr. Professor of Languages and Literature, who taught at Bard from 1990 to 2009. The center seeks to create dynamic projects for the most talented of a new generation of writers and artists of African origin. The Achebe Center is based at Bard College, and operates all over the continent of Africa—throughout the world when necessary—always looking for new literary adventures, always creating exciting possibilities, always driven to create new platforms and interactions for exciting writers and artists to collaborate and produce. For more information, visit achebecenter.bard.edu.

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 (8.9.11)

This event was last updated on 08-16-2011

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