The Atlanta Journal-Constitution has named Binyavanga Wainaina to its list of people around the world worth watching in 2008, along with U.S. Gen. David Petraeus, Spanish actor Javier Bardem, Fidel and Raul Castro, and other high-profile notables in the worlds of politics, business, the arts and athletics.
The Kenyan-born Wainaina is the final year of a three-year term as the College's writer-in-residence. The honor from the newspaper capped a year of accolades and recognition for Wainaina.
In the fall, Wainaina was a guest and speaker in the Partnership-with-Africa Conference, hosted by the German President Horst Koehlerin the Monastery “Eberbach” near Frankfurt, Germany. Other guests included the Asantehene (the king of the Asante in Ghana), English writer John le Carré, Somali writer Nurrudin Farah, German writer llija Trojanow and the presidents of Nigeria, South Africa, Sierra Leone, Tanzania and Germany.
Wainaina was also a guest speaker and panelist at the New Images of Africa Conference in Olso, Norway, hosted by the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Other speakers included Swedish writer Henning Mankell, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, the president of Sierra Leone, and Pumzile Mlambo-Ncguka, the vice president of South Africa. He also spent time in Marfa, Texas on a Lannan Foundation scholarship.
Last summer, Wainaina was a guest contributor to Vanity Fair’s special issue devoted to Africa and wrote an essay for Harper's. He was a finalist for a National Magazine Award, the magazine industry’s highest honor. Wainaina 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.
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, who won the won the prestigious Caine Prize for African Writing in 2002, is teaching three classes at Union this term, including Contemporary African Fiction.
To read about Wainaina and the others on the list of people around the world worth watching in 2008, click here (registration may be required).