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

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

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.

Even if we want to eradicate our ghosts, our dead, our murdered, even if you erase a name and the record of the existence of a person, somebody remembers.

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

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

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