The 2010 Storymoja Hay Festival, Kenya's premier literary event will be held on the 1st to 3rd October at Railways Club, Nairobi. The festival will have over 70 events in 3 days of brilliance. Kwani Trust will be holding three events during the festival.

Kwani Trust Events Diary
Day One: Friday, October 1st, 2010

Tent : Rhino. Sponsored by Kwani Trust
Time: 2.00 - 3.30 PM
Event: Top 2 Winners of The Short Story Competition ( Mehul Gohil and Brenda Mukami) talk to David Kaiza

Day Two: Saturday, October 2nd 2010

Tent : Rhino Tent.
Time: 4.00 -5.30 PM
Event: 'Authors talk to Media' Stanley Gazemba and Eva Kasaya talk to Joseph Ngunjiri.

Day Three: Sunday October 3rd 2010

Tent: Rhino
Time: 11.30 -1.30 PM
Event: Towards 2012: David Kaiza, Samuel Munene and Boniface Mwangi Talk About Picha Mtaani - The State Of The Nation.

Tickets
Buy your advance ticket online using Mpesa or Zap from Rachel's Bargain Corner.

Friday, October 1- One day pass 500/=
Saturday, October 2, One day pass 500/=
Sunday, October 3, One day pass 500/=
Season ticket for all 3 days, 1,000/=

Writers Profiles

Mehul Gohil
Mehul Gohil works in the retail industry, knows alot about health foods like low calorie oat biscuits and tasteless, styro-foamish rice cakes, reads as much Karpov as he does Delillo, has watched MJ Live In Japan 327 times, and his greatest moment in life was when he got a winning position against GM Nigel Short in a friendly blitz game (and then he promptly went ahead to screw up that beautiful attack). Mehul won the Kwani? Short Story Competition with his short story 'Farah Aideed Goes To Gulf War'. He is by day a boring white collar professional who works in the retail industry and has an undergraduate degree in International Business Administration. 

However, come night time and at other times, Mehul Gohil metamorphes into Dr. Jekyll's favourite botched experiment a.k.a. Mehul Gorilla. A relatively schizophrenic specie, he is one part chess freak (Kenya National Team), 2.4 parts obedient slave to his hero Micheal Jackson and 0.0001 parts fiction writer. Among the Gorilla's favourite things are Don Delillo novels.

Brenda Mukami Kunga
Brenda  short story 'All In The Family' was a first runners up during the short story competition. Brenda , 24, writes between ward rounds, after theatre and before classes. Also on Sunday mornings, public holidays and randomly at 3 a.m. when the spirit moves her.

Joseph Ngunjiri
Joseph Ngunjiri is an arts correspondent with the Sunday Nation. He writes mostly on books and literary issues. He has received the National Book Development Council award for promoting literature in the country, for two years running 2008 and 2009. He is also a member of Marimba Arts Media, an online journal for African Arts Journalists (www.marimbamedia.net). He also runs maisha yetu, a literary blog (www.kenyanbooks.wordpress.com)

Stanley Gazemba
Stanley was born in Vihiga, Western Kenya , in 1974 and studied at the Kakamega High School . After school he worked as a tea-picker, a clerk in a steel factory in Mombasa , and a gardener in Nairobi. His first novel, The Stone Hills  of Maragoli, won the Jomo Kenyatta Literary Prize in 2003, one of Kenya 's most prestigious literary awards. The African Review of Books described his book as "an ordinary tale of love, celebration, betrayal and revenge? all in a context that is at once familiar for its emotional impact and unfamiliar for its cultural environment". Stanley lives in Nairobi and is currently working on several different litererary  works.

Eva Kasaya
Eva  currently lives with her son, Ben, in Western Kenya. She works as a clothing designer for Kuwesa, an organisation based at Kaimosi that reaches out to HIV widows by teaching them how to make  clothing and crafts which they sell to earn a living.

David Kaiza
David Kaiza is an online editor at Kwani Trust and  from Northern Uganda, a region that has had more than its share of warfare, so it's no surprise that Kaiza's first novel is about conflict. Ahead of anticipated literary success, Kaiza's reputation has been forged in conflict of another sort - that of literary criticism.

For Press Enquiries Please contact
Renee Mboya - r.mboya@kwani.org
Nancy Onyango -n.onyango@kwani.org