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

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

The young readers I have interacted with carry old concerns repackaged in the skin of a new generation: puzzlement over continuous national moral failings, contradictions with the elders, nostalgia for a nonexistent Kenyan past.

I am indebted to anyone who has ever written anything. I am indebted to the unknown carver of pictograms on a gallery of stone panels, which I encountered and stood in silence before on top of a distant odd-shaped hill in northern Kenya. For whatever reason the muses have most unexpectedly invited me to join this immense procession. I am humbled and delighted.

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

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.

Every Kenyan writer has offered me something to hold onto, something to believe in.