Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor was the featured guest at the MacMillan Memorial Library on Saturday, August 3, 2019. She was moderated by Nanjala Nyabola.
Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor emerged in 2003 when her short story Weight of Whispers won the Caine Prize for African Writing. She took on the title “novelist” with her 2013 debut novel Dust which focuses on the Northern part of Kenya and Nairobi. It won the Jomo Kenyatta Prize for Literature in 2015 and made the shortlists for both the Folio Prize 2015 and FT/Oppenheimer Fund Emerging Voices.
Her newest novel The Dragonfly Sea with a focus on the coastal part of East Africa and China was published on March 12, 2019. It launched on March 1 at Prestige Books in Nairobi before she went abroad to promote the book.
The beloved author has been back home for a while now doing reading events for Nairobians such as at the Point Zero Book Café where she read to the café’s patrons. Another of these events was at the Macmillan Memorial Library on Saturday, August 3.
The Macmillan Memorial Library which is undergoing refurbishment has been hosting many events in the last few months. While there is still a lot of work to do, like awful lighting and a roof that clearly needs to be fixed, the venue has slowly started to become the go-to place to do literary events in Nairobi.
It was a packed audience that got to interact with the author first through the moderator then during the question and answer session and then at the end when they got to have their books signed. The books like in the previous event were being distributed by our friends from Prestige Books.
The images in this post by Paul Munene are courtesy of the Book Bunk.
