KENYAN WRITER Binyavanga Wainaina (1971–2019) was among the greatest of his generation. A winner of the Caine Prize for African Writing, in the final decade of his life he had become as well a celebrated speaker, and was even named to TIME’s list of “Most Influential People in the World.”
Knowing him was not unlike reading him: he could be dazzling, compelling, and exhausting all at once. The unusual velocity of his most famous essays, especially “How to Write About Africa” (2005) and “I Am a Homosexual, Mum” (2014), means that many readers think of his writing as characterized by polemic and raw confession. But his work could also be gentle, loving, and playful, and nowhere are these qualities more evident than in his fiction.