Gabriel Dinda Olewe
Gabriel Dinda Olewe is a Kenyan educator, author, and literary-culture architect who has spent the past decade opening doors for new African voices. In 2014, while still an undergraduate, he founded Writers Guild Kenya (WGK), now the country’s largest writers’ incubator, offering craft workshops, mentorship circles, and editorial support that have launched more than 100 first-time authors in fiction, poetry, and creative non-fiction. WGK’s flagship After-5 Writing Programme runs simultaneously in five counties and has partnered with the Kenya National Library Service to stage 260 public readings since 2018.
To ensure finished manuscripts reach readers, Dinda co-created the All-African Bookshop in Nairobi’s CBD, a bricks-and-mortar and e-commerce outlet that stocks only African titles and operates a profit-sharing model favourable to indie writers. His own bibliography includes Guide to Self-Publishing (2018) and the reflective essay collection Questions of My Youth (2019).
Dinda lectures ethics and philosophy at Strathmore University, where he is pursuing a PhD in Climate Justice, exploring storytelling as a tool for environmental advocacy. He sits on the Nairobi International Book Fair advisory board and curates the annual African Authors’ Awards, underscoring his conviction that robust, home-grown literature is vital to the continent’s social and intellectual progress.