THE REVIEW: “Truly a powerful portrait of a young heroine (Khira)
whose prompt mind, in contemplation of the golconda of her experiences abroad leads to
a surreal journey back to the simplistic tradition of her African upbringing.”
—A.K. Kuykendall
AUTHOR BIO – A P VON K’ORY
Akinyi
Princess of K'Orinda-Yimbo (pen name A P von K'Ory) was born on the shores of
Lake Victoria in Kisumu, the capital city of Luoland, Kenya; at a very young
age (when she was too small to say "sod off!" as she puts it), she
was sent to private school in Yorkshire, England. She is a graduate journalist
of the Nairobi and the London Schools of Journalism as well as an economics
graduate of the London School of Economics.
She
moved to Bavaria, Germany, where she studied Germanistics and Germanspecific
economics. She has been writing as a freelance journalist since 1980, serving
as a columnist with various dailies and monthly magazines in Africa and Europe.
She gives lectures and seminars in various German universities, colleges and high
schools on topics ranging from socio-economy in Africa, Business English,
Intercultural Communication, African literature and the socio-ethnological
conflicts in the traditions of Africans and Europeans in particular, and the
West in general.
In
2012, she got her Doctor of Philosophy in Sociology and Geo-Politics from the
Heidelberg University.
She
was the CEO of her companies Eur-AfrAsia Association for Quality Management
& Intercultural Communications Training, and PAKY Investment Holdings Ltd.
She gave up both posts in order to devote her time to her passion: writing. She
is now only Chairman on the Board of Directors. She has written and published
articles, papers, and a novel in German: Khiras Traum, translated from
her first book, Bound to Tradition: The Dream. The series include Bound to
Tradition: The Initiation and Bound to Tradition: The Separation. Her other
recent books are Secret Shades Book 1: Aroused; Secret Shades Book 2:
Revealed.. Her nonfiction book Darkest Europe and Africa's Nightmare: A crtical
Observation of Neighboring Continents was published in 2008 by a New York
publisher.
In
2010 her short story, The Proposal, won the Cook Communications first prize. In
2012 she won the Karl Ziegler Prize for her commitment to bring African culture
to the Western society in various papers, theses and lectures. In 2012 her book
was nominated for the 2012 Caine Prize, and in 2013 she was shortlisted for the
Commonwealth Writers Prize. In addition she won the Achievers Award for African
Writer of The Year 2013 in the Netherlands.
In
2014 she started the publishing company, AuthorMePro Press, as part of the Cook
Communications Author-me Group, to assist aspiring writers - especially from
the developing world - to get published. She
speaks seven languages, is married to a German politician of aristocratic
descent, has a son, two grandsons, and lives in Bavaria. The family also has
homes in France, Cyprus and Greece.
THE
INTERVIEW:
1. Tell
us a bit about yourself.
I was born in Luoland, Kenya to the royal house of K’Orinda and Yimbo-Kadimo.
I went to school in Yorkshire from age nine, and studied Economics, Literature
and Journalism in London; then Germanistics and German-specific Economics in
Germany. Finally, I studied socio-economics and philosophy and now have an
additional PhD in sociology and geo-politics.
I’m the winner of six writing
awards from four continents, the last one being the Achievers Award for African
Writer Of The Year 2013 in the Netherlands with my trilogy BOUND TO TRADITION.
I have five doctorates to date, since I regard
knowledge as a lifelong quest of learning something new. In between all that, I
run several companies coaching intercultural communication, quality management
& sustainability, Business English and AuthrorMePro Press. I now live in
Germany, France, Cyprus and Greece with my German husband, son and two
grandsons.
2. At what point in your life, did you decide you wanted to be a writer?
The exact time is hard for me to nail down. From the age of three or four,
I enjoyed the stories read to me and once I could read, I always changed some
endings or beginnings of the fairy tales to fit my taste. I guess that’s when
the writer in me kicked in – around age four to five.
3. What are your most memorable or proudest moments in your writing
career?
Definitely the day I met my German publisher’s editor to sign the contract
for the first book of BOUND TO TRADITION. Yes, the first buyer of BOUND TO
TRADITION was a German publisher who then had the book translated and titled
KHIRAS TRAUM! Khira’s Dream.
4. Where would you like to see yourself in five years’ time?
I sincerely hope not where James
Patterson is, manufacturing books in some mass production outlet. However, I do
envy him his success. I wouldn’t mind some of that myself.
5. What advice do you wish you’d been given before starting your career in
writing?
Well, since I always did things my way anyway – remember that fairy tale
changer child? – I really can’t think of one.
6. Tell us about the books you’ve written so far, and your plans for any future
books?
Now that’s a good one, A.K. My passion revolves around my people, their
culture and my continent as a whole, even if I grew up in Great Britain. Nearly
every book I’ve written has a bit of Kenya and Luoland in it. But having grown
up and been educated in Europe, I can’t help but pitch both continents in me -
Africa and Europe/the West - together.
I pick on their values and beliefs, their negatives and positives. All my
romance novels have elements of the interracial and intercultural. All my
non-fiction deal with the humanities, socio-economics and geo-politics of
Africa and the West, although I also touch on the general North-South factors.
In the trilogy BOUND TO TRADITION, which the Elite
Professionals Magazine compared to A Many
Splendoured Thing and labelled “a cultural study”, Khira and Erik are poles
apart: in age difference, cultures, social status, ethnicity, ideology and
philosophy of life. But in the end it is precisely their differences that draws
them closer together. Khira is fascinated by the wealthy industrialist Swede
Erik, who is 24 years older than her. His “strange” looks
(blond, blue eyes and “scorched-skinned”), his lifestyle, his values and
cultural mores, some of which outright shock or repulse her – but still remain
fascinating because she expects something else, especially from him as a
“civilized European”. Her people call Erik “the uncultured one” because to them
he’s too direct and therefore lacking of social delicacy and tactfulness.
Although Erik, to begin with, only wants to adopt the orphaned Khira, she
overwhelms him with her nature. Consider his thoughts below on the first time
he invited Khira for lunch. She is sixteen:
Erick
watched her as she ate and talked. There was the little lady who had been
tutored by some prim and proper English old maid in deportment, etiquette and
what have you. Then there was the African jungle side of her that had a savage
nobility, an untainted edge, an unaffected grace and inborn dignity, an
intensely reverent pride even in the way she said: Great ancestors. Coupled
with her veiled, mysterious sexuality, she was an overwhelming enigma. She
displayed her joy and happiness with child-like abandon but when she spoke of
her family, she spoke with poise and the wisdom of a septuagenarian.
In my SECRET SHADES books, Anglo-Cypriot Helena struggles
with a heritage that cripples her and traumatizes her emotional relationships.
Until she meets Ramón, a Catalan from Costa Brava, Spain, who loves her and
coaxes her to confront her fears and overcome them. To do that, they have to
travel to Kenya in the quest to find her mother in a Benedictine convent. In
Kenya, they encounter political intrigues, the danger of the Kenyan wildlife
safaris, assassination attempts and the wild, untamed beauty of the continent
and its people.
At the moment I’m working on my DAR DESIRES books. These
are full books (120+K words) literary erotic romance, the first of which, DARK
DESIRES: OBSESSION, is coming out at the end of October 2014. The second book
DARK DESIRES: AFLAME will come out in spring 2015. Of course, the DARK DESIRES
books are multi-layered, intercultural and set around the globe, from Hamburg
to Shanghai, Montreux to New York, London to Nairobi and all the other places
in between. I’m a global citizen and have travelled a lot around the planet,
thanks to my upbringing. I’m also working on another no-fiction regarding
globalization and causes of the shameful hunger in the world, when we actually
produce enough food to feed twice the
world population at the moment.
7. Is there any part of your career, you find particularly challenging?
Actually, yes. It is particularly challenging to me to find a
publisher/agent interested in my stories because the stories are not exactly
mainstream commercial writing. They’re literary, geared towards a certain
readership, especially those people interested in other cultures. Being
literary works, they win me awards, but they don’t sell by the boatloads in
this day and age.
8. Who do you feel, has supported you most, in your writing?
Most? Definitely my husband and immediate family. There are others like
Kenneth Mulholland (Australia) and Betsi Newbury (Arizona) without whom I’d be
hopeless. They advise me and edit my works.
9. Is there anything you’d like to say to your readers?
Tons. But I’ll restrict it to thanking them from the heart for reading my
books, especially my editors Betsi Newbury and Kenneth Mulholland, who are
always my first readers. I also thank my readers for all the feedback I get
from them and encourage them to continue interacting with me. Their praises and
critiques help me become a better writer for them and for any new readers.
10. Where can we find out more about you and your books?
My books are on Amazon and Kindle worldwide, my websites and Goodreads.
11. Tell us a little about your book.
Okay: I’ve mention something about both the award-winning BOUND TO
TRADITION trilogy and the SECRET SHADES books. So let’s say something about my
DARK DESIRES: OBSESSION (130K word) that’s coming out at the end of October.
As I mentioned above it is an erotic romance. But it
is literary and a far cry from the norm. I’m one of those women who, without
condemning others who prefer the hard-core BDSM lifestyle, don’t believe in the
popular idea of female submission. I don’t want my heroine falling flat on her
backside just at the first sight of the hero, I don’t want her subservient,
stripped naked and on her knees on the floor waiting for the hero to come home
to find her like that because that’s what turns him on. I don’t want my heroine
revelling in the pains inflicted on her if those pains are the kind that still
sting under the shower days later and make it uncomfortable for her to sit
down. I think that sort of erotica might be sending out (unintentionally) the
wrong signals to young adults of both sexes, about what to
expect/receive/demand from a partner in order to be loved or to show you’re
love by them. I prefer the subtle BDSM peppered with psychological games rather
than physical “punishment”. My long blurb:
Roman
is cultured, go-to-hell handsome, wealthier than is good for anybody and nasty
with it. He has strong principles:
He
loves his parents, especially his mother; he is the supreme commander-in-chief
of his highly successful global businesses, which he built himself from the
ground up; while he loves the fact that he is “what I am”, he adamantly refuses
to be referred to as damaged; and he treats his "reigning queen"
exactly like a queen, draping her in priceless gowns, jewels, and all the other
accoutrements in exchange for her complete loyalty and sexual devotion. In the
bedroom, he's a nice-nasty Taipan and only his rules count - but top among the
rules is complete satisfaction of the woman. He never takes whips, floggers,
chains and the like to his woman as he believes strongly in “pleasure, not
pain” for both partners, and he has many varied and effective ways of
extracting and dispensing pleasure. He never stays around for long – half a year
would be tops in his books.
Then
Roman meets the Eve that will bring his Dominant Adam teetering on the brinks
of insanity... or maybe not quite…
12. What were you attempting to convey in the artistry of your book cover?
In BOUND TO TRADITION, there’s the theme of the Planet
Earth with all its elements, best emphasized by the moon. The moon rises, gets
to the zenith and dips back in the horizon. What I wanted to convey was a sense
of togetherness as earthlings in this beautiful planet of ours. I still love
the BOUND TO TRADITIONS covers most.
13. What inspired you to write your book?
My quest to show that we are all unique with whatever
we’re made of. Nature has its order in variety and never makes a careless
mistake. It would be a boring world with only one ethnicity – like having only
red roses and no other colours of the flower. I suppose a lot is also
autobiographical, inspired by my own life.
14. Are the character profiles based on people you
know or are they completely drawn from your imagination?
(Tongue-in-cheek) See 13 above. I think it’s about
fifty-fifty. Often I invent a character and give him attributes of someone I
know or saw somewhere. I guess I’m still that little girl, still rearranging my
fairy tale in the order I prefer them to be.
15. Which part of the book, in your opinion, was the
most difficult to write?
The killing of my darlings, of course. I actually cry
while writing that, and cry again each time I’m revising and re-revising. But
in BOUND TO TRADITION: THE DREAM, the first book, the hardest parts were those
where I had to write the dialogue between Erik and Khira’s Grandfather Solomon.
The Luos, like most Africans, talk in a roundabout way, not directly. The
language is flowery and the real point being made is hidden in the winding
dialogue. Erik, as a European, speaks his mind directly, a fact considered
extremely rude and barbaric in Luoland and most African societies. Direct
speakers are time-conscious. Rural Africans have all the time in the world and
will spend five minutes or more just to say hello.
16. What parts of the book do you love, in particular?
I loved the scene where Khira visits a gynaecologist
for the first time, in Sweden. Again, this scene gave me the opportunity to
crystalize the two negating ideologies and philosophy of life.
17. Which ways have you chosen to market your book?
Like most writers, I’m not only poor at marketing, I
also hate it. I do my best with Facebook, Twitter and posting in groups,
especially my groups in LinkedIn. When I win an award I send out press
releases. But living in German reduces the interest in these, since I’m not
“local”. Otherwise I do guest blogs and interviews, giveaways and solicit for
reviews. The last, I’ve learnt, is not easy. My best chances of getting reviews
are within literary book clubs and special groups with interest in African
culture & literature. I often do readings and book signings to special
women’s groups, students of sociology and such special interest groups.
18. If you had to do it all over again, is there
anything you’d change?
I don’t think there’s anything I’d change, really. But
there’s something I do regret and would gladly reverse – keep my former publisher.
I’ve since gone through a few publishers, one particular one in New York, who
published my first non-fiction. The publisher turned out to be a right royal
cutthroat. When I signed the contract with them (without an agent) I missed the
tiny little BIG words “in perpetuity”. And so now they own my work and leave me
out in the cold.
19. Where can we find out more or buy the book?
20. Who is your favourite author?
I have several, actually, because I have different
favourite authors in different genres. My top faves would be Marian Keyes for
chic lit, John Le Carré, Ian Rankin, Harlan Corben, Lee Child, and Minette
Walters.
21. Worst book you have ever read?
Fifty Shades of Grey.
22. What book are you reading now?
As I’m in the habit of reading more than one book at a
time, I’m now reading Personal by Lee
Child, Im Tal des Fuches by Charlotte
Link (my favourite German authoress), and L’Empire de la honte by
Jean Ziegler. I speak seven languages so I often read in most of them, although
English is my native language.
23. Your favourite quote about writing/authors:
“If
first-time authors were never published, the world wouldn't have any authors at
all. It's a misconception that getting published requires having already been
published.”
24. Your biggest inspiration:
The human condition.
25. Something you can’t live without:
My husband Erich Harald.
26. Your pet-hate:
When I ask Erich Harald something about football but
he’s too concentrated on the game to answer me. Like I’m thin air.
27. Your favourite place to be:
Our place in the Peloponnese, Greece, perched above
the sea and the mountains on the other side of the Finikounda Bay.
28. Something you like/love about yourself?
Having been born a woman.
29. Something you’d change about yourself?
My impatience.
30. Your ideal life would be:
To permanently live and write in my favourite home, in
Greece.
Finally thank you so very much for giving me
this opportunity, A.K. And another big thank you to you, dear reader, for
reading this. I hope we meet again in my books.
