Speaker Biographies
To date, we have confirmed the participation of Nuruddin Farah, Alexandra Fuller, Uwem Akpan, and Billy Karanja Kahora.
Nuruddin Farah
Born in 1945 in Baidoa, Somalia, Nuruddin Farah is the author of ten novels, a nonfiction book, and numerous articles and stories in English; his work has been translated into more than 20 languages. The first novel in his dictatorship trilogy, Sweet and Sour Milk, won the English-Speaking Union Literary Prize in 1980, and in 1998, he was given the Neustadt International Prize for Literature. Long before the collapse of Somalia’s government, he was pushed into exile by the dictator Siyad Barre, and has lived, taught, and written in many African countries. He currently resides in Capetown, South Africa. Because his first novel concerns the plight of a young Somali woman forced into an arranged marriage, and because his work traces relations between dictatorship at the national scale and patriarchal tyranny at the family scale, he has been celebrated as a “feminist” African writer. Having dealt with dictatorship, breakdown, and exile in earlier works, Farah has begun in his current trilogy ( Links, Knots, and a third novel in progress) to imagine possible modes of a return to Somalia.
Alexandra Fuller
At the age of three, Alexandra Fuller and her family moved to Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) during that country's bloody struggle for independence. Fuller’s experience of that war has informed all of her books. Fuller was educated in Zimbabwe until she was eighteen, first at a small government boarding school near the family’s farm in the country’s eastern mountains and then at a private, girls-only boarding school in Harare. Watching the celebratory atmosphere in the aftermath of independence gradually turn into the horror of Mugabe’s one-man attempt to take a country to the grave with him has also informed Fuller’s work. “Africa is a great teacher,” she has explained. “We’re not a good example of much, but we’re a terrible warning of power run amok and of the long, high price of oppression.” Fuller has written three books of nonfiction. Her debut book, Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight: An African Childhood (Random House, 2001), was a New York Times Notable Book for 2002, the 2002 Booksense Best Non-fiction book, a finalist for the Guardian’s First Book Award, and the winner of the 2002 Winifred Holtby Memorial Prize. Her 2004 Scribbling the Cat: Travels with an African Soldier (Penguin Press) won the Ulysses Prize for Art of Reportage. Her third book was The Legend of Colton H. Bryant(May 2008 by Penguin Press). Fuller is currently working on a book about her mother that is tentatively titled Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Unforgetfulness (2011), and which is a prequel/sequel to Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight.
Visit Alexandra Fuller's website.
Uwem Akpan
In his own words: I was born under a palm-wine tree in Ikot Akpan Eda in Ikot Ekpene Diocese in Nigeria. I was inspired to write by the people who sit around my village church to share palm wine after Sunday Mass, by the Bible, and by the humor and endurance of the poor. My grandfather was one of those who brought the Catholic Church to our village. I was ordained as a Jesuit priest in 2003, and I like to celebrate the sacraments for my fellow villagers. Some of them have no problem stopping me in the road and asking for confession!
I have very fond memories of my childhood in my village, where everybody knows everybody, and all my paternal uncles still live together in one big compound. When I was growing up, my mother told me folktales and got me and my three brothers to read a lot. I became a fiction writer during my seminary days. I wrote at night, when the community computers were free. Computer viruses ate much of my work. Finally, my friend Wes Harris believed in me enough to get me a laptop. This saved me from the despair of losing my stories and made me begin to see God again in the seminary. The stories on that first laptop are the core of Say You're One of Them. I received my MFA in creative writing from the University of Michigan in 2006. In 2007, I taught in Harare, Zimbabwe. Now I serve at Christ the King Church, Ilasamaja-Lagos, Nigeria.
Billy Karanja Kahora
Billy Karanja Kahora is a writer from Kenya and the managing editor of the journal Kwani. His writings have been published in Granta, Kwani, and Vanity Fair. He recently edited Kenya Burning, and is an editor of the Picha Mtaani/Kwani book project. He has a book of creative nonfiction, The True Story of David Munyakei (2009), as well as the script credit for Soul Boy (2010, Dir. Tom Tykwer).
Kahora studied and worked in South Africa for 8 years and in between worked as an editorial assistant for one of the largest African news sites, All Africa.com in Washington D.C. He also has a Bachelor of Journalism degree and post-graduate diploma in Media Studies from Rhodes University South Africa.
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