Binyavanga Wainaina, Union's writer-in-residence, is among the finalists announced this week for the National Magazine Awards, the magazine industry's highest honor.
Wainaina, 36, was nominated in the Fiction category, which honors the quality of a publication's literary selections. Wainaina's piece, “Ships in High Transit,” was selected as part of the entry for The Virginia Quarterly Review. His story had already won the literary journal's top short fiction prize for 2006.
Other works competing in this category appeared in McSweeney's, The New Yorker, Playboy, and Zoetrope: All-Story.
Winners will be announced in New York City May 1.
The Kenyan-born Wainaina is in the second year of a three-year term as visiting writer.
In 2002, he won the prestigious Caine Prize for African Writing for his short story, “Discovering Home,” and The Independent, a newspaper in the United Kingdom, recently named him one of the 50 best artists in Africa.
Last January, Wainaina's satirical piece for Granta, “How to Write about Africa,” became one of the literary magazine's most widely reprinted stories. It included advice on the collection of stereotypes and clichés authors could fall back on when writing about his homeland.
Wainaina will teach three classes at Union during the spring term, including Modern African Literature.