Portrait
Binyavanga Wainaina
Born
18 January 1971Nakuru, Kenya
Died
21 May 2019Nairobi, Kenya · aged 48
WriterKenya55th birthday

Binyavanga Wainaina

His writing challenged clichés about Africa and made room for new literary voices and openly queer lives.

Binyavanga Wainaina was born in Nakuru, Kenya, in 1971. After studying in South Africa, he won the 2002 Caine Prize for African Writing with “Discovering Home”. The award helped him establish a wider platform for his own work and that of other African writers.

As the founding editor of “Kwani?”, launched in Nairobi in 2003, he helped create space for a new literary generation. His satirical essay “How to Write About Africa” (2005) exposed the stock images through which Western readers were often encouraged to see the continent. His memoir, “One Day I Will Write About This Place”, appeared in 2011.

In January 2014 he published “I am a homosexual, mum”, presented as a lost chapter of that memoir. Coming amid renewed anti-gay legislation in Africa, the essay made his private experience a public challenge to silence and exclusion. Time included him among its 100 most influential people that year.

Wainaina announced that he was HIV-positive in 2016. He died in Nairobi in 2019, aged 48, leaving writing that joined intimate experience with a sharp critique of how African lives are represented.

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