For What Are Butterflies Without Their Wings by Troy Onyango

About Troy Onyango

For What Are Butterflies Without Their Wings by Troy Onyango

Troy Onyango is a writer from Kisumu whose short story collection features stories that have been published in platforms such as The Johannesburg Review of Books, Isele Magazine, the Namibian Doek Magazine, and Harvard's Transition Magazine. The titular story won him the inaugural Nyanza Literary Festival Prize in 2016, and he has received a Pushcart Prize nomination. He is the founder of Lolwe, which is considered among the leading online literary magazines on the continent. (WAKILISHA) The collection is striking for its refusal of easy categorisation — the stories blend the naturalistic and the fantastical, the personal and the political, in ways that feel wholly original. Onyango writes about bodies under pressure, about love in environments that criminalise it, about grief and survival and the small acts of defiance through which people maintain their humanity against all odds. The butterfly of the title is a perfect metaphor for the collection's central concern: what happens to beauty and fragility in a world determined to destroy them?