Kenneth Binyavanga Wainaina (18 January 1971 – 21 May 2019) was a Kenyan author, journalist and 2002 winner of the Caine Prize for African Writing.

[11] In July 2002 he won the Caine Prize for his short story "Discovering Home"[12][13] (the judges being Ahdaf Soueif, Margaret Busby, Jason Cowley and Abdulrazak Gurnah).

[14] Wainaina was the founding editor of Kwani?,[15][16] the literary magazine in East Africa that sprang out of an artistic revolution that started in 2002.

has since become an important source of new writing from Africa;[15] Yvonne Owuor also wrote for the magazine and won the Caine Prize in 2003.

And although, like many, I go to sleep at night fantasizing about fame, fortune and credibility, the thing that is most valuable in my trade is to try, all the time, to keep myself loose, independent and creative ... it would be an act of great fraudulence for me to accept the trite idea that I am "going to significantly impact world affairs".

[16][32] Wainaina died, aged 48, after a stroke on the evening of 21 May 2019, at Aga Khan Hospital in Nairobi, according to news and family sources.