A Constellation of Lives - A Conversation with Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor

Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor (b. 1968) is one of Kenya’s most accomplished contemporary authors, known for her intricate prose, lyrical sensibility, and profound engagement with memory, place, and belonging. Her body of work includes short fiction, essays, and two novels—Dust (2013) and The Dragonfly Sea (2019)—and spirals around the question of how individual and collective identities are transformed by history, geography and ecological entanglements. Difficult memories and (collective) amnesia permeate her oeuvre, which can be described as contributing to a larger mnemonic project. Time and again, this project situates itself at the crossroads of culture and environment, interweaving myth, politics, and the intimate textures of daily life. Throughout Owuor’s texts, non-human agents recur, functioning as witnesses, archives and spaces of shelter. This conversation was inspired by explorations of the presence of trees in Owuor’s writing, her fiction and literary journalism.