June 7, 2007: Volume 70, Number 10

Union's writer-in-residence featured in latest Vanity Fair

Binyavanga Wainaina, Union’s writer-in-residence, is featured in Vanity Fair’s special issue devoted to Africa, out today.

Wainaina’s piece, “Generation Kenya,” is a deeply personal tale about growing up on the world’s second-largest continent and the media’s insistence on treating Africa’s 53 countries as a “vast, hopeless mass.”

Bono, of the music group U2, served as guest editor for the issue, which has 20 different covers featuring prominent people like Muhammad Ali, Desmond Tutu, Maya Angelou, George W. Bush and Madonna.

Vanity Fair has a circulation of 1.2 million.

This is the second national magazine to feature Wainaina’s writing this spring; he also wrote an essay for the current issue of Harper’s.

In May, Wainaina was a finalist for a National Magazine Award, 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.

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 is teaching three classes at Union this term, including Modern African Literature.

 

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