Troy Onyango

Troy Onyango (born 1993) is a Kenyan writer, editor and lawyer. His work has appeared in journals and magazines including Prairie Schooner, Wasafiri, Caine Prize Anthology, Brittle Paper, and Transition Magazine issue 121, for which his short story "The Transfiguration" was nominated for the Pushcart Prize. His short story "For What Are Butterflies Without Their Wings" won the fiction prize for the inaugural Nyanza Literary Festival (NALIF) Prize. Quotes A great translation gives a book a new lease of life. It gets under the skin of the original language and pushes until the resulting text becomes radically different, while the story remains as close to the original as possible, with no less depth or clarity. I love a book that is bold, daring, ambitious, and loud… loud in the sense that it knows what it is and it takes up so much space there’s little room for others. That’s how I know what’s memorable Books allow us to travel to countries and cities and towns and villages we might never go to. We learn so much about other people’s cultures and it is as though we speak their language in the moments we are with them in those pages. Translated fiction expands the list of countries we can travel to, and allows us even greater access to stories from which we would have otherwise been locked out. The International Booker has facilitated this access for so many readers, allowing us to find books and stories beyond those from our own nations or languages. The first storyteller in my life was my great-grandmother who loved to tell stories and made me fall in love with reading. I believe that oral tradition is just as important as written stories. I didn’t have access to many story books as a child as the priority was school textbooks. I sought out as much as I could, whenever I could. As I got older, I loved reading writers like Grace Ogot, Margaret Ogolla, Barbara Kimenye, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, and many others who shaped my literary imagination. External Category: living people