Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor | |
|---|---|
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| Born | 1968 (age 55–56) Nairobi, Kenya |
| Occupation | Writer |
| Nationality | Kenyan |
| Genre | Literary fiction |
| Notable awards | Caine Prize for African Writing (2003) |
Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor (born 1968) is a Kenyan writer who is the author of novels, short stories and essays. She won the 2003 Caine Prize for African Writing for her story "Weight of Whispers".
Born in Nairobi, Kenya, Owuor studied English at Kenyatta University, before taking an MA in TV/Video development at Reading University. She obtained an MPhil in Creative Writing from the University of Queensland, Australia.
Owuor has worked as a screenwriter and from 2003 to 2005 was the executive director of the Zanzibar International Film Festival. [1] Her writing has appeared in numerous publications worldwide, including Kwani? and McSweeney's , and her story "The Knife Grinder’s Tale" was made into a short film of the same title, released in 2007. [2] [3] In 2010, along with Binyavanga Wainaina, Owuor participated in the Chinua Achebe Center's "Pilgrimages" project and travelled to Kinshasa, and intends to produce a book about her experiences. [4] She is a contributor to the 2019 anthology New Daughters of Africa , edited by Margaret Busby. [5]
Owuor's 2014 novel Dust portrays the violent history of Kenya in the second half of the 20th century. Reviewing Dust in The New York Times , Taiye Selasi wrote: "In this dazzling novel you will find the entirety of human experience — tearshed, bloodshed, lust, love — in staggering proportions." [6] Ron Charles of The Washington Post wrote: "Owuor demonstrates extraordinary talent and range in these pages. Her style is alternately impressionistic and harsh, incantatory and propulsive. One moment, she keeps us trapped within the bloodied walls of a torture cell; in the next, her poetic voice soars over sun-baked plains. She can clear the gloom with passages of Dickensian comedy or tender romance, but most of her novel takes places in 'haunted silences.' 'Dust' moves between the lamentation of a single family and the corruption of national politics, swirling around one young man’s death to create a vortex of grief that draws in generations of deceit and Kenya’s tumultuous modern history." [7]
In 2019, her second novel, The Dragonfly Sea was published. [8] The Dragonfly Sea is set on Pate Island, off the coast of Kenya, and about a girl named Ayaana living with her mother, Munira. When a sailor named Muhidin enters their lives, Ayaana finds something she has never had before: a father. But as Ayaana grows into adulthood, forces of nature and history begin to reshape her life and the island itself–from a taciturn visitor with a murky past to a sanctuary-seeking religious extremist, from dragonflies to a tsunami, from black-clad kidnappers to cultural emissaries from China. Ayaana ends up embarking on a dramatic ship's journey to the Far East, where she discovers friends and enemies; seduced by the charming but unreliable scion of a powerful Turkish business family; reclaims her devotion to the sea; and comes to find her own tenuous place amid a landscape of beauty and violence and surprising joy. [9]
Owuor won the 2003 Caine Prize for African Writing for her story "Weight of Whispers", which considers an aristocratic Rwandan refugee in Kenya. [10] The story was originally published in Kwani? , the Kenyan literary magazine set up by Binyavanga Wainaina after he won the Caine Prize the previous year.
In 2004, she won the Woman of the year (Arts, Heritage category) for her contributions to the arts in Kenya. In September 2015, her critically acclaimed book Dust was shortlisted for the Folio Prize, and won Kenya's pre-eminent literary prize, the Jomo Kenyatta Prize for Literature. [11]
Nowhere in Africa is a 2001 German drama film that was written and directed by Caroline Link. The screenplay is based on the 1995 autobiographical novel of the same name by Stefanie Zweig. It tells the story of the life in Kenya of a German-Jewish family that emigrated there in 1938 to escape persecution in Nazi Germany. The film won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film as well as the 2001 German Film Award (Deutscher Filmpreis) in five categories, including Best Fiction Film.
Kenneth Binyavanga Wainaina was a Kenyan author, journalist and 2002 winner of the Caine Prize for African Writing. In 2003, he was the founding editor of Kwani? literary magazine. In April 2014, Time magazine included Wainaina in its annual Time 100 as one of the "Most Influential People in the World".
The Caine Prize for African Writing is an annual literary award for the best short story by an African writer, whether in Africa or elsewhere, published in the English language. Founded in the United Kingdom in 2000, the £10,000 prize was named in memory of businessman and philanthropist Sir Michael Harris Caine, former chairman of Booker Group and of the Booker Prize management committee. The Caine Prize is sometimes called the "African Booker". The Chair of the Board is Ellah Wakatama, appointed in 2019.
Mũkoma wa Ngũgĩ is a Kenyan American poet, author, and academic. He is associate professor of literatures in English at Cornell University and co-founder of the Safal-Cornell Kiswahili Prize for African Writing. His father is the author Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o. His family was deeply impacted by the bloody British suppression of the Mau Mau revolution.
Kwani? is a prominent African literary magazine headquartered in Kenya. It has been hailed as "undoubtedly the most influential journal to have emerged from sub-Saharan Africa".
Kenyan literature describes literature which comes from Kenya. Kenya has a long literary tradition, both oral and written; primarily in English and Swahili, the two official languages of the country.
Taiye Selasi is an American writer and photographer. Of Nigerian and Ghanaian origin, she describes herself as a "local" of Accra, Berlin, New York and Rome. In 2005, Selasi published "Bye-Bye, Babar ", her seminal text on Afropolitans. Her novel, Ghana Must Go, was published by Penguin in 2013.
Afropolitan is a term constructed from the name Africa and the ancient Greek word πολίτης ('politis'), meaning 'citizen'. It is an attempt at redefining African phenomena by, on the one hand, placing emphasis on ordinary citizens' experiences in Africa and, on the other hand, reconceptualizing the African Diaspora's relationship with the African continent. Afropolitanism is used and defined in various ways. The novelist Taiye Selasi and the political theorist Achille Mbembe are immediately associated with the coinage of the term and its fundamental theorization.
Zukiswa Wanner is a South African journalist, novelist and editor born in Zambia and now based in Kenya. Since 2006, when she published her first book, her novels have been shortlisted for awards including the South African Literary Awards (SALA) and the Commonwealth Writers' Prize. In 2015, she won the K Sello Duiker Memorial Literary Award for London Cape Town Joburg (2014). In 2014, Wanner was named on the Africa39 list of 39 Sub-Saharan African writers aged under 40 with potential and talent to define trends in African literature.
Beverley Nambozo Nsengiyunva is a Ugandan writer, poet, actress, literary activist, and biographer. She is the founder of the Babishai Niwe (BN) Poetry Foundation formerly The Beverley Nambozo Poetry Award for Ugandan women, which began in 2008 as a platform for promoting poetry. It has since grown to include all African poets and runs as an annual poetry award. In 2014, the award will extend to the entire continent, targeting both men and women. The same year, the foundation will also publish an anthology of poetry from poets of Africa. She is also the founder of the Babishai Niwe Women's Leadership Academy. Nambozo joined the Crossing Borders Scheme British Council Uganda in 2003 under the short stories genre. She was nominated for the August 2009 Arts Press Association (APA) Awards for revitalising poetry in Uganda after initiating the Beverley Nambozo Poetry Award, the first poetry award for Ugandan women.
Ellah Wakatama, OBE, Hon. FRSL, is the Editor-at-Large at Canongate Books, a senior Research Fellow at Manchester University, and Chair of the AKO Caine Prize for African Writing. She was the founding Publishing Director of the Indigo Press. A London-based editor and critic, she was on the judging panel of the 2017 International Dublin Literary Award and the 2015 Man Booker Prize. In 2016, she was a Visiting Professor & Global Intercultural Scholar at Goshen College, Indiana, and was the Guest Master for the 2016 Gabriel Garcia Marquez Foundation international journalism fellowship in Cartagena, Colombia. The former deputy editor of Granta magazine, she was the senior editor at Jonathan Cape, Random House and an assistant editor at Penguin. She is the series editor of the Kwani? Manuscript Project and the editor of the anthologies Africa39 and Safe House: Explorations in Creative Nonfiction.
Africa39 was a collaborative project initiated by the Hay Festival in partnership with Rainbow Book Club, celebrating Port Harcourt: UNESCO World Book Capital 2014 by identifying 39 of the most promising writers under the age of 40 with the potential and talent to define trends in the development of literature from Africa and the African diaspora. Launched in 2014, Africa39 followed the success of two previous Hay Festival initiatives linked to World Book Capital cities, Bogotá39 (2007) and Beirut39 (2009).
Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi is a Ugandan-British novelist and short story writer. Her doctoral novel, The Kintu Saga, was shortlisted and won the Kwani? Manuscript Project in 2013. It was published by Kwani Trust in 2014 under the title Kintu. Her short story collection, Manchester Happened, was published in 2019. She was shortlisted for the 2014 Commonwealth Short Story Prize for her story "Let's Tell This Story Properly", and emerged Regional Winner, Africa region. She was the Overall Winner of the 2014 Commonwealth Short Story Prize. She was longlisted for the 2014 Etisalat Prize for Literature. She is a lecturer in Creative Writing at Lancaster University. In 2018, she was awarded a Windham-Campbell Prize in the fiction category. In 2021, her novel The First Woman won the Jhalak Prize.
Okwiri Oduor is a Kenyan writer, who won the 2014 Caine Prize for African Writing for her short story, ‘My Father’s Head’. In April 2014 she was named on the Hay Festival's Africa39 list of 39 Sub-Saharan African writers aged under 40 with potential and talent to define trends in African literature, with her story "Rag Doll" being included in the subsequent anthology edited by Ellah Allfrey, Africa39: New Writing from Africa South of the Sahara.
Asenath Bole Odaga was a Kenyan publisher and author of novels, plays, children's books, and other literary works. Odaga also promoted literature in Kenyan languages and the study of oral literature by writing in Luo and co-authoring a guide to oral literature for students.
The Aké Arts and Book Festival is a literary and artistic event held annually in Nigeria. It was founded in 2013 by Lola Shoneyin, a Nigerian writer and poet, in Abeokuta. It features new and established writers from across the world, and its primary focus has been to promote, develop, and celebrate the creativity of African writers, poets, and artists. The Aké Arts and Book Festival has been described as the African continent's biggest annual gathering of literary writers, editors, critics, and readers. The festival has an official website and a dedicated magazine, known as the Aké Review.
Makena Onjerika is a Kenyan writer, who won the 2018 Caine Prize for African Writing, making her the fourth writer from her country to do so—following wins by Binyavanga Wainaina in 2002 and Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor in 2003, and Okwiri Oduor in 2013.
Gloria Mwaniga is a Kenyan writer, educator and columnist for the Daily Nation and The EastAfrican. She is a graduate of the University of Nairobi and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Writing Workshop in Nigeria. In 2019, she was awarded a Miles Morland Writing Scholarship, and in 2022 her story "Boyi" was awarded the inaugural African Land Policy Centre Story Prize. Her story was subsequently included in Finding Ground and other stories: ALPC Anthology of short stories on Land in Africa. Her work has appeared in The Johannesburg Review of Books and The White Review.
The Dragonfly Sea is a coming-of-age family novel by Kenyan writer Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor. It was published by Knopf Publishers, imprint of Penguin Random House, in 2019.
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