“I am interested in how humans react to a collective ‘wounding’. I wanted to play around with the possibility that in a time of human madness, a primate that might have experienced a similar kind of wounding before would make us understand and see something we couldn’t see for ourselves…that in a time of conflict and war, we lose everything that we are and maybe we need other kinds of ‘intelligences’…  

Billy Kahora is selected as Granta Online's New voice for February 2010. Read his interview with Online Editor Ollie Brock here

  Read The Gorilla's Apprentice, his selected story, here