This year’s StoryMoja Hay Festival boasted a fantastic line-up of renowned African authors and poets.

The festival was tragically cut short by the attacks on Westgate. Thankfully, there were several days of inspiring lectures and readings.

One writer, Teju Cole, perhaps had the most hype surrounding him. Cole, a Nigerian-American writer and photographer, is a critical darling whose words and opinions seem to be resonating with thousands of people.

One of his essays, The White Saviour Industrial Complex, which discussed the problematic nature of KONY 2012 and other “white savior” projects in Africa, went viral and put Cole on the international map. See more at The Star.co.ke

“There is no freedom, only degrees of tyranny” award winning American poet and Opthamoligist Dr Neal Hall’s statement to an audience seated in a miniature amphitheatre at the Nairobi National Museum cripples any reasoning behind carving out a day and calling it a time to celebrate independence. Why celebrate something that in reality may not exist?

Hall joined a panel of two other poets British based Somali poet Warsan Shire and South African Mongane Wally Serote at the StoryMoja Hay festival to “voice the unspoken” among them; freedom, oppression and racial identity. See more The Star.co.ke

Temo Buliro was one of the writers at this year’s Storymoja Hay Festival. She recently launched her second book Faceless Voices,which is a collection of short stories based on contemporary African and modern day USA.

The tales focus on the senses; sight, hearing, taste, smell and intuition. The stories address many of the concerns in today’s society. These include suppressed expressions and emotion; infidelity and divorce; career ambitions and the “glass ceilings”; mental illness or disease; and domestic violence.

To Buliro, writing is her passion and she enjoys every bit of it. Her work has appeared in several leading East Africa newspapers and magazines. See more at The Star.co.ke

Alice Vincent was at the Hay Festival Nairobi when terror struck. She hears the writers who refused to be silenced.

Half way through the Storymoja Hay Festival I stopped concentrating. Two miles away, in the only part of Nairobi I had become familiar with during my short stay, militant Islamist group Al-Shabaab had opened fire on innocent people in the Westgate Mall. Helicopters flew overhead, and although normality prevailed around the festival tents, I felt a little sick, a little scared, a little short of breath.

The speculated casualty numbers passed through Twitter to word of mouth around the National Museum of Kenya, the leafy, rambling location for the festival. By lunchtime 12 had died, shortly after it was 20. See more at The Telegraph.

A new ebook series launching at Nairobi’s Storymoja Hay Festival aims to satisfy Kenya’s appetite for romance fiction, reports Alice Vincent.

In Kenya, writer and editor Vaishnavi Ram Mohan tells me, there is “a huge appetite” for romance novels. But the problem is that the only romances available are from other countries. Mohan and her co-editor, Faith Gatimi, are trying to change that; this weekend at Storymoja Hay Festival in Nairobi, they will launch Drumbeats, a new series of romance ebooks set in Kenya and neighbouring Uganda.

“It’s romance, East African-style”, says Mohan. “These are stories for East Africans, about East Africans, by East Africans. The challenges people face here in relationships are different from those experienced around the world.” See more at The Telegraph.

When suspected terrorists opened fire in a shopping centre in Nairobi’s upmarket Westlands district, Alice Vincent was sitting two miles away listening to Mukesh Kapila, the former Head of the UN for Sudan, talk about why humans have such potential for cruelty.

Here, in the city where Kapila decided to blow the whistle on the Darfur genocide a decade ago, and end his career in the process, bloodshed had arrived on the Hay Festival’s doorstep.

I first heard the news when an audience member stood up and said that there had been an armed robbery at the nearby Westgate Mall and told us to avoid the area. Nigerian author Teju Cole was due to speak at the festival next (his fans were jostling by the doors), and a little later, as Cole was answering a question about “the precariousness of being African”, I was told to text my loved ones saying I was safe; people had been shot. See More at The Telegraph.

On the day before Nairobi erupted into violence, Alice Vincent saw the Storymoja Hay Festival visited by 3,000 schoolchildren.

The traffic in Nairobi is rarely straightforward: matatus, city buses, taxis and hand-pulled carts jostle with pedestrians, sending clouds of dust into the air with the sound of horns and fuzzy blasts of car radios.

But on Friday, the Storymoja Hay Festival was causing traffic chaos. Dozens of school buses clogged the entrance to the National Museum as a record 3,000 schoolchildren descended on the festival site.