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

I like talking to myself and making patterns out of the letters of the alphabet on blank surfaces.

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

Kenya is a mercurial character. I feel the country has a presence that can turn on its people in a very violent way.

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.

It may not seem that way, but I am an absolute optimist, an unrepentant optimist.

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