Binyavanga Wainaina

Total similar authors (25)

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  Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor

  Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor (born 1968) is a Kenyan writer, who was named "Woman of the Year" by Eve Magazine in Kenya in 2004 for her contribution to the country's literature and arts. She won the 2003 Caine Prize for African Writing for her story "Weight of Whispers", which considers an aristocratic Rwandan refugee in Kenya. 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.
  
  Born in Nairobi, Owuor studied English at Jomo Kenyatta University, before taking an MA in TV/Video development at Reading University. She has worked as a screenwriter and was the Executive Director of the Zanzibar International Film Festival from 2003 to 2005. Her short sto

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  Eduardo Sánchez Rugeles

  Licenciado en Letras (Universidad Católica Andrés Bello, Caracas); Licenciado en Filosofía (Universidad Central de Venezuela); Magíster en Estudios Latinoamericanos (Universidad Autónoma de Madrid) y en Estudios Literarios (Universidad Complutense de Madrid). Ganador del Premio Iberoamericano de Novela Arturo Uslar Pietri (2010) con Blue Label / Etiqueta Azul. La novela Transilvania unplugged resultó finalista en el mismo certamen.

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  Dipo Faloyin

  "Dipo Faloyin is a Senior Editor at VICE, where he focuses on race, culture, and identity around the world. His writing has also appeared in Dazed, Prospect, Huffington Post, and Refinery 29 among other publications. Born in Chicago, raised in Nigeria, he currently lives in London." -- Library of Congress Authorities

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  Peter Kimani

  PETER KIMANI is a leading Kenyan journalist and author of, most recently, Dance of the Jakaranda, a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. The novel was nominated for the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award in the US and long-listed for the inaugural Big Book Awards in the UK. He has taught at Amherst College and the University of Houston and is presently based at Aga Khan University’s Graduate School of Media and Communications. Nairobi Noir is his latest work.

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  Okwiri Oduor

  Okwiri Oduor (born 1988/1989) is a Kenyan writer, who won the 2014 Caine Prize with 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.

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  Chinua Achebe

  Works, including the novel Things Fall Apart (1958), of Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe describe traditional African life in conflict with colonial rule and westernization.
  
  This poet and critic served as professor at Brown University. People best know and most widely read his first book in modern African literature.
  
  Christian parents in the Igbo town of Ogidi in southeastern Nigeria reared Achebe, who excelled at school and won a scholarship for undergraduate studies. World religions and traditional African cultures fascinated him, who began stories as a university student. After graduation, he worked for the Nigerian broadcasting service and quickly moved to the metropolis of Lagos. He gained worldwide attention in the late 1950s; his la

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  bell hooks

  bell hooks (deliberately in lower-case; born Gloria Jean Watkins) was an African-American author, feminist, and social activist. Her writing focused on the interconnectivity of race, class, and gender and their ability to produce and perpetuate systems of oppression and domination. She published over thirty books and numerous scholarly and mainstream articles, appeared in several documentary films and participated in various public lectures. Primarily through a postmodern female perspective, she addressed race, class, and gender in education, art, history, sexuality, mass media and feminism.

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  Steve Coll

  Steve Coll is President & CEO of New America Foundation, and a staff writer at The New Yorker magazine. Previously he spent 20 years as a foreign correspondent and senior editor at The Washington Post, serving as the paper's managing editor from 1998 to 2004.
  
  He is author six books, including The Deal of the Century: The Break Up of AT&T (1986); The Taking of Getty Oil (1987); Eagle on the Street, based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning account of the SEC's battle with Wall Street (with David A. Vise, 1991); On the Grand Trunk Road: A Journey into South Asia (1994), Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan and Bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001 (2004); and The Bin Ladens: An Arabian Family in the Americ

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  Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o

  Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o was a Kenyan author and academic, who was described as East Africa's leading novelist.
  He began writing in English before later switching to write primarily in Gikuyu, becoming a strong advocate for literature written in native African languages. His works include the celebrated novel The River Between, plays, short stories, and essays, ranging from literary and social criticism to children's literature. He was the founder and editor of the Gikuyu-language journal Mũtĩiri. His short story The Upright Revolution: Or Why Humans Walk Upright was translated into more than 100 languages.
  In 1977, Ngũgĩ embarked upon a novel form of theatre in Kenya that sought to liberate the theatrical process from what he held to be "the genera

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  Leila Aboulela

  Leila Aboulela grew up in Khartoum, Sudan where she attended the Khartoum American School and Sister School. She graduated from Khartoum University in 1985 with a degree in Economics and was awarded her Masters degree in statistics from the London School of Economics. She lived for many years in Aberdeen where she wrote most of her works while looking after her family; she currently lives and lectures in Abu Dhabi.
  
  She was awarded the Caine Prize for African Writing in 2000 for her short story The Museum and her novel The Translator was nominated for the Orange Prize in 2002, and was chosen as a Notable Book of the Year by the New York Times in 2006.
  
  

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  Nawal El Saadawi

  Nawal El Saadawi (Arabic: نوال السعداوي) was born in 1931, in a small village outside Cairo. Unusually, she and her brothers and sisters were educated together, and she graduated from the University of Cairo Medical School in 1955, specializing in psychiatry. For two years, she practiced as a medical doctor, both at the university and in her native Tahla.
  
  From 1963 until 1972, Saadawi worked as Director General for Public Health Education for the Egyptian government. During this time, she also studied at Columbia University in New York, where she received her Master of Public Health degree in 1966. Her first novel Memoirs of a Woman Doctor was published in Cairo in 1958. In 1972, however, she lost her job in the Egyptian government as a resu

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  Tsitsi Dangarembga

  Spent part of her childhood in England. She began her education there, but concluded her A-levels in a missionary school back home, in the town of Mutare. She later studied medicine at Cambridge University, but became homesick and returned home as Zimbabwe's black-majority rule began in 1980.
  
  She took up psychology at the University of Zimbabwe, of whose drama group she was a member. She also held down a two-year job as a copywriter at a marketing agency. This early writing experience gave her an avenue for expression: she wrote numerous plays, such as The Lost of the Soil, and then joined the theatre group Zambuko, and participated in the production of two plays, Katshaa and Mavambo.
  
  In 1985, Dangarembga published a short story in Sweden cal

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  Wangari Maathai

  Wangari Maathai was a Kenyan environmental and political activist. She was educated in the United States at Mount St. Scholastica and the University of Pittsburgh, as well as the University of Nairobi in Kenya. In the 1970s, Maathai founded the Green Belt Movement, an environmental non-governmental organization focused on the planting of trees, environmental conservation, and women's rights. In 1984, she was awarded the Right Livelihood Award, and in 2004, she became the first African woman to receive the Nobel Peace Prize for “her contribution to sustainable development, democracy and peace.” Maathai was an elected member of Parliament and served as Assistant Minister for Environment and Natural Resources in the government of President Mwa

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  Tash Aw

  Born in Taiwan to Malaysian parents, Tash Aw grew up in Kuala Lumpur before moving to England in his teens. He studied law at the University of Cambridge and University of Warwick, then moved to London to write. After graduating he worked at a number of jobs, including as a lawyer for four years whilst writing his debut novel, which he completed during the creative writing course at the University of East Anglia. Based on royalties as well as prizes, Aw is the most successful Malaysian writer of recent years. Following the announcement of the Booker longlist, the Whitbread Award and his Commonwealth Writers' Prize, he became a celebrity in Malaysia and Singapore, and is now one of the most respected literary figures in Southeast Asia.

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  Tiziano Terzani

  Tiziano Terzani was an Italian journalist and writer, best known for his extensive knowledge of 20th century East Asia and for being one of the very few western reporters to witness both the fall of Saigon to the hands of the Vietcong and the fall of Phnom Pehn at the hands of the Khmer rouge in the mid-1970s.

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  Agneta Pleijel

  Agneta Pleijel is a Swedish novelist, poet, playwright, journalist and literary critic. She was assigned professor at Dramatiska Institutet from 1992.She was awarded the Dobloug Prize in 1991.

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  Peter Kimani

  PETER KIMANI is a leading Kenyan journalist and author of, most recently, Dance of the Jakaranda, a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. The novel was nominated for the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award in the US and long-listed for the inaugural Big Book Awards in the UK. He has taught at Amherst College and the University of Houston and is presently based at Aga Khan University’s Graduate School of Media and Communications. Nairobi Noir is his latest work.

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  Linda Boström Knausgård

  Linda Boström Knausgård debuted with the poetry collection Gör mig behaglig för såret in 1998. Her prose debut is entitled Grand mal.

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  Okwiri Oduor

  Okwiri Oduor (born 1988/1989) is a Kenyan writer, who won the 2014 Caine Prize with 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.

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  Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi

  Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi, a Ugandan novelist and short story writer, has a PhD from Lancaster University. She is a lecturer in Creative Writing at Lancaster University and lives in Manchester with her husband Damian and son Jordan.
  
  Her first novel, Kintu, won the Kwani Manuscript Prize in 2013 and was longlisted for the 2014 Etisalat Prize for Literature. Her story Let's Tell This Story Properly won the 2014 Commonwealth Short Story Prize. In 2018 she was awarded a Windham-Campbell Prize in the fiction category. In 2021, her novel The First Woman won the Jhalak Prize.
  
  Makumbi's writing is largely based on oral traditions. She realised that oral traditions were so broad and would be able to frame all her writing regardless of subject, form o

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  Omar El Akkad

  Omar El Akkad is an author and journalist. He was born in Egypt, grew up in Qatar, moved to Canada as a teenager and now lives in the United States. The start of his journalism career coincided with the start of the war on terror, and over the following decade he reported from Afghanistan, Guantanamo Bay and many other locations around the world. His work earned a National Newspaper Award for Investigative Journalism and the Goff Penny Award for young journalists. His fiction and non-fiction writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Guardian, Le Monde, Guernica, GQ and many other newspapers and magazines. His debut novel, American War, is an international bestseller and has been translated into thirteen languages. It won the Pacific N

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  Jason F. Stanley

  Jason Stanley is the Jacob Urowsky Professor of Philosophy at Yale University. He is the author of five books, including How Propaganda Works, winner of the Prose Award in Philosophy from the Association of American Publishers, and How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them, about which Citizens author Claudia Rankine says: “No single book is as relevant to the present moment.” Stanley serves on the board of the Prison Policy Initiative and writes frequently about propaganda, free speech, mass incarceration, democracy, and authoritarianism for The New York Times, The Washington Post, Boston Review, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and The Guardian.
  
  

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  Ibtisam Azem

  Ibtisam Azem is a Palestinian novelist and journalist. She has published two novels in Arabic. The Book of Disappearance has been published in English, German, and Italian. Her first short story collection will be published in 2024. She lives in New York.

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  Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

  CHIMAMANDA NGOZI ADICHIE grew up in Nigeria. Her work has been translated into more than fifty-five languages. She is the author of the novels Purple Hibiscus, which won the Commonwealth Writers' Prize; Half of a Yellow Sun, which was the recipient of the Women’s Prize for Fiction “Best of the Best” award; Americanah, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award; the story collection The Thing Around Your Neck and the essays We Should All Be Feminists and Dear Ijeawele, or A Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions. Her most recent work is an essay about losing her father, Notes on Grief, and Mama’s Sleeping Scarf, a children’s book written as Nwa Grace-James. A recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, she divides her time between the Unit

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  Dipo Faloyin

  "Dipo Faloyin is a Senior Editor at VICE, where he focuses on race, culture, and identity around the world. His writing has also appeared in Dazed, Prospect, Huffington Post, and Refinery 29 among other publications. Born in Chicago, raised in Nigeria, he currently lives in London." -- Library of Congress Authorities

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