Binyavanga Wainaina’s breakout essay How To Write About Africa (published in Granta in 2006) made a sharp case against the stereotypes that invariably accompany Western writing about Africa.

His memoir One Day I Will Write About This Place is about his childhood and youth – Kenya where he grew up, South Africa where he went to college, and later on his travels through other parts of east Africa that went on to make him a “pan-Africanist” as he calls himself.

It could be dubbed the Kenyan version of the Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and is filled with a vividness of imagery that is matched by its prose. Later, we’d know it as a Portrait of the Artist as a Young Gay Man, after he came out in a moving essay published on the internet, I am a Homosexual, Mum – what he called the “lost” chapter of his memoir.

Published in 2011