Tracing the Genealogy of the Kenyan Political Novel – a Case for the Nationalist Autobiography as its Genesis

Speaker: Dr Billy Kahora – Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at the University of Bristol

Drawing on materials from the African Writer’s Series archive at the University of Reading’s Special Collections, Dr Billy Kahora’s seminar will trace links between the early Kenyan political novel and the country’s nationalist biographies/cultural ethnographies - works which were the first book-length Kenyan publications. His talk will focus especially on Jomo Kenyatta’s Facing Mt Kenya. Dr Kahora will illustrate how the narrative choices of such non-fiction works were just as crucial to the early Kenyan novel form as their thematic political content.

About our speaker:
Dr Billy Kahora is writer of fiction and non-fiction from Kenya. He has written a non-fiction novella The True Story Of David Munyakei and a short story collection titled The Cape Cod Bicycle War and Other Stories. His short fiction and creative non-fiction have appeared in Chimurenga, McSweeney’s, Granta Online and Kwani? and he has twice been shortlisted for the Caine Prize for African Writing. He is also a Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at the University of Bristol. His research examines narrative voice, mimesis and multivocality in the novel (with an emphasis on African and Kenyan forms), realisms, non-fiction and creative writing teaching pedagogies. He has a PhD in Creative Writing from the University of Manchester, an MSc Creative Writing from University of Edinburgh, and a Journalism and English degree from Rhodes University, South Africa. He is a past recipient of the Chevening Scholarship, an Iowa Writer’s Fellowship and the President’s Award at the University of Manchester.