I should be (a) marking mock exam papers for my A level students or (b) editing Not Broken for the deadline next week! However I promised to start posting Zero Degrees over on AO3 today, and that’s what I’ve just done. I thought I’d drop in here too.
When I was a kid growing up in Kenya, I read everything I could get my hands on. I could never find anything much about people living their regular lives in Kenya – there were a couple of memoirs, particularly of colonials, but my family is PEAK colonial. I heard all those stories direct from the source.
Instead I always promised myself that if I ever did become a published author, I’d write about Kenyans. The aliens would invade Mombasa. The superhero would come from Kiambu. The one true love story would be set in Nairobi.
I have since written a book about a Kenyan living in Scotland, a coming-of-age story set in my home village of Shimoni (even more poignant for me now since a big port is being built there and almost all of the forest has gone ;_;), and Zero Degrees, where the god of winter takes his family to hide in Nairobi. In fact, the only book without a Kenyan in it is Not Broken! The Willing doesn’t have a Kenyan in either, but to be fair, I had just finished Slopes of Mau Summit, which is based in 1920s Kenya, so I was just aiming for some balance.
I don’t expect many people to read Zero Degrees – original stuff on AO3 doesn’t get much traffic because that’s not what AO3 is for! But I hope whoever reads it will enjoy it as much as I enjoyed writing it.
Lyn Hemphill 