Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor

Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor

Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor (* 1968 in Nairobi , Kenya ) is a Kenyan writer.

Life

Owuor studied English and History at Kenyatta University in Nairobi before completing her MA in Television / Video from the University of Reading in England . She then studied creative writing at the University of Queensland in Australia, which she completed with a thesis on the poet Haji Gora Haji .

In 2003 Owuor received the British Caine Prize for African Writing for the best newly published short story in English, The Weight of Whispers . This was in the same year in the Kenyan literary magazine Kwani? Founded by Binyavanga Wainaina . (Swahili: for?) Was first published. In this case, Abdulrazak Gurnah , as chairman of the award committee, made the decision in favor of Owuor. The short story was published in 2006 as a book by Kwani Trust.

In 2004 Owuor was the director of the Zanzibar International Film Festival in charge of the literary forum. The writer's publications in recent years include the novels Dressing the Dirge , The State of Tides and The Knife Grinder's Tale . The Grinder's Tale was filmed in 2007 by RL Hooker.

Her first novel was published in 2006. In Dust , she addresses the political unrest after the elections in Kenya. The novel is set in northern Kenya, which is increasingly marginalized in the country.

In her novel The Dragonfly Sea , published in 2019, Owuor focuses on another area of ​​Kenya: the Swahili coast and the Lamu archipelago . Owuor weaves the island of Pate into a transnational network of relationships that leads the protagonist Ayaana from Kenya via China to Istanbul. The development novel takes the interweaving of the Indian Ocean as a model.

In 2018/19 Owuor was a fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin , where she worked on her third novel.

2019 it was included in the anthology New Daughters of Africa by Margaret Busby added.

Prizes and awards

• 2003: Caine Prize for African Writing for The Weight of Whispers.
• 2015: Jomo Kenyatta Prize for Literature for Dust .

Works

fiction

• The Weight of Whispers . Kwani Trust, Nairobi 2006. ISBN 9966-7008-3-8 . [1]
• Dust . Kwani Trust, Nairobi 2013, ISBN 978-9966-15-983-0 .
  • The place where the journey ends . Translated from the English by Simone Jakob. DuMont, Cologne, ISBN 978-3-7632-6857-3 .
• The Dragonfly Sea. Knopf, New York 2019. ISBN 978-0-451-49404-7
  • The sea of ​​dragonflies. Translated from the English by Simone Jakob. DuMont, Cologne. ISBN 978-3-8321-8114-7 . Will be released on September 22nd, 2020.

Essays

• O-Swahili - language and liminality. In: Matatu No. 46 April 2015.
• In Search of Poem-Maps of the Swahili Seas: Three Sea Poems by Haji Gora Haji. In: Eastern African Literary and Cultural Studies No. 3–4, October 2018, pp. 164–178.
• Imagined Waters , in: Chimurenga Chronics.

Web links

• Biography in the Guardian
• Weight of Whispers and Biography in Kwani?
• Biography of the International Literature Festival Berlin about Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor
• Conversation about the place where the journey ends
• Conversation and reading by Yvonne Adhiambo Owuo and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
• Taiye Selasi : Review of Dust in: The New York Times
• Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin: Fellows

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Clean cups. East African authors in the Hessian Literature Forum . In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung of February 26, 2011, p. 51.
2. ↑ http://www.imdb.com/