Munyao Kilolo

Member

Munyao Kilolo works as a Project Officer for the Ngugi wa Thiong’o Foundation. He also manages the Mabati-Cornell Kiswahili Prize for African Literature and has previously served as the project lead for the Jalada Africa language and translation project. The inaugural Jalada translation issue, which he conceptualized and continues to provide editorial coordination, features the single most translated short story in the history of African writing, now available in 98 languages. Munyao served as the Managing Editor for Jalada Africa between 2014 and 2018 and is a founding member of the Pan-African Collective. He also served as Festival Director for the Jalada Mobile Literary and Arts Festival in 2017, which saw the Collective log 4,500 kilometers across twelve cities in five countries (Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda, Tanzania and the DR Congo) over a four-week period. The festival featured workshops, readings, art events and stage performances. Munyao’s writings have been published in Saraba Magazine, Veem House of Performance and Radio Africa Magazine among others. He has a book chapter in the Routledge Handbook for Translation and Activism. His translation into Kikamba has appeared in Absinthe, a literary journal that is run out of the Department of Comparative Literature, at the University of Michigan. Munyao studied Journalism at the United States International University and Publishing at the Seagull School of Publishing. He writes in Kikamba, Kiswahili and English.