Writer
Octobre à décembre 2018
Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor was born in Nairobi, Kenya. She studied English and History at the Kenyatta University, earned a Master of Arts degree at the University of Reading, UK, and an MPhil (Creative Writing) from the University of Queensland, Brisbane. From 2003 to 2005, she was the executive director of the Zanzibar International Film Festival under the remit of which a literary forum was established. The Kenya-based literary magazine Kwani? published her short story, The Weight of Whispers, which earned her the Caine Prize for African Writing in 2003. Owuor’s fragmented, poetic and emotionally charged style continued with her highly acclaimed debut novel, Dust (2014). The book is a recounting of a story of Kenya’s hidden pasts through the odyssey of a disrupted family from the north of Kenya. In 2015, the book was shortlisted for the Folio Prize. Several translations are available. Her second novel, The Dragonfly Sea (2019) a coming-of-age story that explores aspects of East African sea imagination in a time of China’s return to its milieu. Owuor’s short stories, articles and essays appeared widely in various publications, including in McSweeney's and Margaret Busby’s Daughters of Africa. Her story The Knife Grinder’s Tale was adapted as a short film. She has contributed articles to various journals included, most lately, the Eastern African Literary and Cultural Studies. For her artistic and cultural contributions, in 2016 Owuor received the (Kenya) Head of State Commendation. Yvonne is also active in the environmental and conservation sector, and is keen about Transoceanic, Transregional, Pluriversal explorations.
"The Coffee Mistress" – a novel in progress
The Coffee Mistress, a contemporary story of coffee explores aspects of African coffee heritage and histories embedded in both the Eastern African soils and its figurative shadows. Coffee with its complex, deep history, and its contested and controversial present is the artefact and metaphor used to explore the theme of restitution and restoration, of cultural appropriation as well as acknowledgment. The story asks if a future where the emotive matters of that which has been robbed, owned, possessed, renamed, and commoditised through multiple historical incidences and an elaborate trade ecology can even be settled equitably. This story is a continuation of an artistic and literary scouring of both metaphorical and historical ruins to exhume ghosts and to interrogate the societal rituals of ‘distillation and purification’, which become the many ways of human forgetting, justifying, mythologising and amputation. This story steps into the world of buna/Arabica’ coffee through North Kenyan, Ethiopian and Eritrean, landscapes, and most significantly, the ‘erased’ spiritual base in Zar, where buna first found a transcendent voice, meaning and character as an honorary human. This story will soak in the desires this sacred/desacralised bean provokes, a study of human cardinal sins, of alchemy, politics, place, soil and belonging. It does (re) locate coffee culture in Eastern Africa in a literary act of returning the bean to its source, home and people.
OWUOR, Yvonne A. "Contemporary Projections: Africa in the Literature of Atrocity (Aftrocity)", in Writers, Writing on Conflicts and Wars in Africa, Adonis and Abbey, 2009, pp. 17–26.
OWUOR, Yvonne A. “O-Swahili: Language and Liminality”, in Matatu, vol. 46, no. 1, 2015, pp. 141–152.
OWUOR, Yvonne A. Dragonfly Sea. Knopf, 2019.
OWUOR, Yvonne A. Dust, Knopf, 2014.
OWUOR, Yvonne A. "Weight of Whispers", in Kwani Journal, 2004.
