I come from a culture that has refined the art of the dirge to a sublime level.

I come from a culture that has refined the art of the dirge to a sublime level.

Even if you're in charge of the grand story there's still memory. The other stories do not go away.

Recording stories is a way of honoring the faculty of memory, even if it's recorded, outsourcing memory to technology.

Novel-writing is a settling, lovely space. I call it self-indulgent - I feel mildly guilty about it.

One day, I was running to the river. Along the way there was the most exquisite butterfly, a tiny little thing, on the pavement. I kind of jumped over it. And then two days later I woke up in the middle of the night with a character running, jumping over butterflies on the streets of Nairobi. After that, I followed the story. The story wrote itself.

Dying away from home, away from the soil of your birth - and to do so unseen and unmourned - is a profound horror.