Ominous Clouds is a collection of poems that have specifically been selected from previous works by the author. The collection comprises poems with the theme of Kenyan politics. Issues of governance, negative ethnicity, and political violence are tackled.
The poems have been translated into Finnish, Norwegian, and Greek. These multiple translations enable the poetry to travel around the globe and beyond the readership in English, the original language in which they were written. As the translators have noted, the translations offer readership in the said languages to learn about the country Kenya as captured in the poetry.
Author Biography:
Christopher Okemwa is a literature lecturer at Kisii University, Kenya. He has a Ph.D. in performance poetry from Moi University, Kenya. He is the founder and current director of the Kistrech International Poetry Festival in Kenya (www.kistrechpoetry.org). His novellas, Sabina and the Mystery of the Ogre won the Canadian Burt Award for African Literature in 2015 while its sequel, Sabina the Rain Girl, has been picked for the UN SDG Africa Book Club. Okemwa has written eight books of poetry with some of the poems translated into Armenian, Chinese, Greek, Norwegian, Finnish, Hungarian, Arabic, Polish, Chinese, Nepalese, Turkish, Russian, Spanish, Catalan, and Serbian. He has also translated four literary works of international poets from English to Kiswahili. He is the editor of Musings During a Time of Pandemic: A World Anthology of Poems on COVID-19 (KTI, 2020), I Can't Breathe: A Poetic Anthology of Social Justice (KTI, 2021), and The Griots of Ubuntu: An Anthology of Contemporary Poetry from Africa (KTI, 2021). He is the author of ten folktales of the Abagusii people of Kenya, three children's storybooks, one play, one collection of short stories, two novels, and four oral literature textbooks. Website: www.okemwa.co.ke Okemwa holds a Ph.D. Literature from Mo University. In addition, he has a Master's in Literature and a Bachelor of Education from the University of Nairobi, Kenya.
