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

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

I don't think Kenya is the only country that tries to induce amnesia - it seems to be a global phenomenon. But offenses do not die. They do not disappear.

For Kenya: we have a chance to start again each time we meet one another. The ghosts do not need to define the future.

I do need to find inner tranquillity and get into a "zone" before I switch on the computer to work on a story. Only after this do I enter the story world, where I meet the characters and, together, we work through the day and night.

Burma evoked the lost Kenyan soldiers who served in the war. You never hear about them. There were a significant number of casualties, men who never came back home. But they're never commemorated.

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