Billy Kahora

Billy Kahora is the Editor of Kwani?, He also writes fiction and has recently completed a Chevening Scholar based at the University of Edinburgh as a Creative Writing postgraduate student.

Billy studied and worked in South Africa for 8 years and in between worked as an editorial assistant for one of the largest African news sites, All Africa.com in Washington D.C. He has a 4-year Bachelor of Journalism degree and post-graduate diploma in Media Studies from Rhodes University South Africa.

After leaving South Africa he wrote ‘The True Story of David Munyakei’, an extended non-fiction piece with literary elements and joined Kwani? to spearhead a new kind of journalism: a journalism that can go beyond the dry official voices of the last 40 years and open up the new socio-cultural and socio-political spaces that are emerging in the country by the use of literary elements.

He has been published in Vanity Fair, Cape Times, and the East African Standard. He has also extensively covered the youth hip hop scene in Nairobi for the British Council’s WAPI (Words and Pictures) landmark project. He was recently highly commended for his short story, ‘Treadmill Love’ by the 2007 Caine Prize judges. He is working on a novel based on his short story, ‘The Applications’ published in Kwani? 3 and also collaborating on a non-fiction book on environmental corruption in Kenya.