Photo/FILE Biyavanga Wainaina, a Kenyan author whose One Day I Will Write About This Place is on Oprah's list.
By KEVIN J KELLEY IN NEW YORK
Posted Monday, July 25 2011 at 21:46
Posted Monday, July 25 2011 at 21:46
A Kenyan writer’s recently published memoir has been chosen by O, The Oprah magazine for its summer reading list.
In a recent Oprah magazine blog post, Mr Binyavanga Wainaina’s One Day I Will Write About This Place is described as an “astonishing, dreamy memoir” that “explores tribal racism, political unrest and Western influences on his homeland with an innocence and confusion”.
‘Oprah effect’
Books highlighted by American superstar TV personality Oprah Winfrey often enjoy an upsurge in sales in what has been dubbed “the Oprah effect.”
In 2009 short stories by Nigerian Uwem Akpan became bestsellers in the United States after Ms Winfrey proposed it to her audience.
Mr Wainaina is the director of the Chinua Achebe Centre for African Literature and Languages at Bard College in New York.
The memoir has not benefited yet from the “Oprah effect” since by Monday it was number 35,020 on the Amazon.com bestseller list.
A review by The Economist, a British weekly, says that the memoir exhibits “a lack of heft - a lot of the book consists of previously published essays and travelogues.”
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