Hay Festival Nairobi: Jekwu Anyaegbuna interview Good fiction is immortal. Generations come and go, reading great literary works of the previous generations. Of course, readers are important in literature. Writers write because readers read. But I think it would be counterproductive for me to think too much about readers - it's impossible to satisfy everybody. But I know that a good work appeals to many people. Thinking about readership might result in a story that is unbelievable, stereotypical, a defective contraption because I am trying to tailor the story to suit a particular set of people, cultures and circumstances, forgetting that fiction is universal. I try to write my stories in the most natural way I can find within myself. Thinking excessively about readers" responses could destroy the immortality and universality of fiction. Is place, the landscape and language of where you're from, something that has a bearing on your writing voice? To make my fiction believable, I have to write about what I know, with the voice I understand well, set somewhere I know. It might not work well for me to write about something I don't know, although fiction puts no limit to my imagination. I don't need to create doubts. So my background has a total grip on my writing. I had a rural upbringing, and sometimes this bears a lot of weight on my writing. Jekwu Anyaegbuna won the 2012 Commonwealth Short Story Prize for Africa for "Morrison Okoli (1955-2010) ." It was first published in June 2012 as part of a collaboration between Granta Magazine (granta.com) and Commonwealth Writers (commonwealthwriters.org). He is appearing on Saturday at 1pm on the US Embassy Stage [Event 44]