Binyavanga Wainaina

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Binyavanga Wainaina (born 1971) is a Kenyan author, journalist and winner of the Caine Prize.

Wainaina was born in Nakuru in Rift Valley province. He attended Moi Primary School in Nakuru, Mangu High School in Thika, and Lenana School in Nairobi. He later studied commerce at the University of Transkei in South Africa, after which he worked in Cape Town for some years as a freelance food and travel writer.

In July 2002 he won the Caine Prize for African Writing for his short story "Discovering Home". He is the founding editor of Kwani?, the first literary magazine in East Africa since Transition Magazine. Since its founding, Kwani? has since become an important source of new writing from Africa; with several writers having been nominated for, and having won, the Caine Prize subsequently.

In 2003, he was given an award by the Kenya Publisher's Association, in recognition of his services to Kenyan Literature. He has written for The EastAfrican, National Geographic, The Sunday Times (South Africa), Granta, the New York Times and The Guardian (UK).

He is presently a Writer-in-Residence at Union College in Schenectady, NY (USA), where he is teaching, lecturing and working on a novel.

In January 2007, Binyavanga Wainaina was nominated by the World Economic Forum as a "Young Global Leader" - an award given to people for "their potential to contribute to shaping the future of the world." He subsequently declined the award. In a letter to Klaus Schwab and Queen Rania of Jordan, he wrote:

"I assume that most, like me, are tempted to go anyway because we will get to be ‘validated’ and glow with the kind of self-congratulation that can only be bestowed by very globally visible and significant people,” he wrote. “And we are also tempted to go and talk to spectacularly bright and accomplished people – our “peers.” We will achieve Global Institutional Credibility for our work, as we have been anointed by an institution that many countries and presidents bow down to.

“The problem here is that I am a writer. And although, like many, I go to sleep at night fantasizing about fame, fortune and credibility, the thing that is most valuable in my trade is to try, all the time, to keep myself loose, independent and creative…it would be an act of great fraudulence for me to accept the trite idea that I am “going to significantly impact world affairs."[1]

Wainaina has collected over 13,000 recipes from around Africa and is an expert on traditional and modern African cuisines.[2]

[edit] Publications

  • Discovering Home (Short Story, G21Net, 2001)
  • An Affair to Dismember (Short Story)
  • Beyond the River Yei: Life in the Land Where Sleeping is a Disease (Photographic Essay, Kwani Trust) With Sven Torfinn
  • How To Write About Africa (Article, satire, Granta 92 2005)


  1. ^ Visiting writer Wainaina winning worldwide accolades, The Chronicle, January 31. 2007 [1]
  2. ^ B. Wainaina, "Black Mischief", G21: The World's Magazine."
Languages