Both novelist and non-fiction writer, a person of Indian origin who feels at home on three continents, MG Vassanji, 65, prides himself on his contradictions. These have served him well in his writing, which has won him numerous awards, including a regional Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for his first novel The Gunny Sack (1989). In novels like The In-Between World of Vikram Lall (2003), Amrika (1999) and The Magic of Saida (2012), Indian characters from East Africa find themselves pulled between the surface attractions of the contemporary West and the exigencies of their ancestral memory.
His last book, And Home was Kariakoo: A Memoir of East Africa (2014), is at one level a recounting of his own childhood in Tanzania (where he was raised); it is also a meditation on the forces of history and culture that shape a person’s life. Yet, Vassanji is never abstract. From the aroma of freshly made mandazi (African doughnut) to the lilting rhythm of Swahili greetings, he delivers the full palette of sensory details that brings his stories to life.
More at the source: Forbes India Magazine
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