Virtually Yours #06 Yvonne Adhiambo Owur
A series of online discussions - Virtual Gatherings - with the award-winning author Zukiswa Wanner, exploring contemporary African Literature with authors.
From the award-winning author of Dust comes a vibrant, stunning coming-of-age novel about a young woman struggling to find her place in a vast world–a poignant exploration of fate, mortality, love, and loss.
The Dragonfly Sea
On the island of Pate, off the coast of Kenya, lives solitary, stubborn Ayaana and her mother, Munira. When a sailor named Muhidin, also an outsider, enters their lives, Ayaana finds something she has never had before: a father. But as Ayaana grows into adulthood, forces of nature and history begin to reshape her life and the island itself–from a taciturn visitor with a murky past to a sanctuary-seeking religious extremist, from dragonflies to a tsunami, from black-clad kidnappers to cultural emissaries from China. Ayaana ends up embarking on a dramatic ship’s journey to the Far East, where she will discover friends and enemies; be seduced by the charming but unreliable scion of a powerful Turkish business family; reclaim her devotion to the sea; and come to find her own tenuous place amid a landscape of beauty and violence and surprising joy. Told with a glorious lyricism and an unerring sense of compassion, The Dragonfly Sea is a transcendent story of adventure, fraught choices, and of the inexorable need for shelter in a dangerous world.
Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor
is an author and lead practitioner in the Eastern Africa creative industry. She won the 2003 Caine Prize for African Writing for her story "Weight of Whispers", Born in Nairobi, Owuor studied English and History at the Kenyatta University, Kenya and later obtained an MPhil (Creative Writing) from the University of Queensland, Australia. Her first novel, ‘DUST’, published by Knopf, NY to critical acclaim, and has been translated into other languages. Her second book, ‘THE DRAGONFLY SEA’, was released in March 2019. Her short stories and critical essays have appeared in different publications worldwide. At present she is working on her next novel, a Kenya father-son story, working title ‘THE LONG DECAY’
If you missed the session, you can watch the record here> Virtually Yours #06.
