Binyavanga Wainaina


Kenneth Binyavanga Wainaina was a Kenyan author, journalist and 2002 winner of the Caine Prize for African Writing. In April 2014, Time magazine included Wainaina in its annual TIME 100 as one of the "Most Influential People in the World".

Early life and education

Binyavanga Wainaina was born on 18 January 1971 in Nakuru in Rift Valley Province, Kenya. 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, where he went to live in 1991. He completed an MPhil in Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia in 2010.
His debut book, a memoir entitled One Day I Will Write About This Place, was published in 2011. In January 2014, in response to a wave of anti-gay laws passed in Africa, Wainaina publicly announced that he was gay, first writing an essay that he described as a "lost chapter" of his 2011 memoir entitled "I am a Homosexual, Mum", and then tweeting: "I am, for anybody confused or in doubt, a homosexual. Gay, and quite happy."

Career

Following his education, Wainaina worked in Cape Town for some years as a freelance food and travel writer.
In July 2002 he won the Caine Prize for his short story "Discovering Home". He was the founding editor of Kwani?, the literary magazine in East Africa that sprung out of an artistic revolution that started in 2002. Established in 2003, Kwani? has since become an important source of new writing from Africa; Yvonne Owuor also wrote for the magazine and won the Caine Prize in 2003.
Wainaina's satirical essay "How to Write About Africa", published in Granta magazine in 2006, attracted wide attention.
In 2003, he was given an award by the Kenya Publishers Association for his services to Kenyan literature. He wrote for The EastAfrican, National Geographic, The Sunday Times, Granta, The New York Times, Chimurenga and The Guardian.
In 2007, Wainaina was a writer-in-residence at Union College in Schenectady, NY. In the fall of 2008, he was in residence at Williams College, in Williamstown, Massachusetts, where he was teaching, lecturing and working on a novel. He was a Bard Fellow and the director of the Chinua Achebe Center for African Literature and Languages at Bard College.
Wainaina collected over 13,000 recipes from around Africa and was an expert on traditional and modern African cuisine.
In January 2007, 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:

Personal life

On 1 December 2016, World Aids Day, Wainaina announced on his Twitter profile that he was HIV positive, "and happy". In 2018 he announced that he would be marrying his long-term partner the following year.

Death

Wainaina died after a stroke on the evening of 21 May 2019, at Aga Khan Hospital in Nairobi, according to news and family sources. He had experienced several strokes since 2016.

Selected publications