Billy Kahora

Billy Kahora is a Kenyan writer and editor based in Nairobi. He was commended by the 2007 Caine Prize judges for his story Treadmill Love. His stories "Urban Zoning" and "Gorilla's Apprentice" were shortlisted for the prize in 2012 and 2014, respectively. He is the author of works including the non-fiction book The True Story of David Munyakei (2008), wrote the screenplay for Soul Boy (2010) and co-wrote Nairobi Half Life (2012). As Managing Editor of Kwani Trust, Kahora has edited seven issues of the Kwani? journal. He is a contributing editor to the Chimurenga Chronic. Quotes No, I didn’t know I wanted to write when I was a kid, I just read a lot ‘til I was in my teens. When I couldn’t find anything to read that satisfied my curiosity, anger, and admiration for all the things I was seeing and experiencing around me, that’s when I thought about recreating my immediate conditions. I did it for fun until things seemed to get worse around me like they do for all teens. I realized then that I had to take this “replication” of my surroundings a bit more seriously. After that writing became my default way of trying to explain the world, life and all else. The denial that this is what I wanted to do went on for a long time and still goes on. My first published piece came out while I worked as a freelance journalist in one of the small Lifestyle magazines that proliferated in Nairobi in the 90s and are now dead and gone. A more significant moment was when I won a short short story competition at the Grahamstown Writers Festival when I was a 3rd year student in Journalism School. The story was called “The Boy At The End Of Sand.” It was 200 words. Talks about his first published piece Great fiction is not written in places where reality is “far in.” Fiction is written in places where people have a grasp on language (both written and oral) that is highly relevant to the material conditions of the society they live in. It’s written in places that have a storytelling tradition that has internalized that society’s culture and economy within the same language(s). Great fiction happens in places where those languages and storytelling traditions can be streamlined into today’s primarily capitalist and modern world, and the publishing offshoots and all the technical processes and mechanisms that come with it. Story for me is powerful images and emotive characters – I see the stuff in between as the technical which brings the story around and creates coherence. My own standard for characters is how emotionally realised they are in the world of the story. I have abandoned many a story because I simply did not feel the character even when they checked the technical boxes, ie detail, motivation, conflict etc. External links