Asad Hussein

In Memory

As a child in Dadaab, then the world's largest refugee camp in eastern Kenya, Asad dreamed of becoming a writer. The dog-eared books he found in the camp school's small library were an escape — a window into a world that felt impossibly distant.

From a very young age, Hussein threw himself into journalism. He reported for Kenya's Daily Nation, the country's largest newspaper, and launched Literary Discourse, a pullout dedicated to African literature. Journalism, he believed, was "the best profession in the world, the recorder of humanity's deeds, the keeper of its conscience."

His byline would later appear in Sahan Journal, The Guardian, The New York Times, The New York Review of Books and Foreign Policy. He wrote with equal grace about his own life in Dadaab and the wider world, reporting on al-Shabab in Somalia, immigrant kitchens in Minneapolis and policing in Harlem. 

At Princeton, where he studied English literature, Asad immersed himself in the riches of Firestone Library. He wrote a collection of short stories about his hometown, A Prayer for Ifo Nuura, a nostalgic return to the place that shaped him, earning the Samuel Shellabarger Memorial Prize in Creative Writing. He also helped lead initiatives supporting students from unconventional backgrounds and served as a humanities preceptor, a teaching role typically reserved for graduate students.

Fluent in four languages, Asad possessed an insatiable curiosity about the world. Friends remember conversations that ranged effortlessly across history, literature, politics and religion. He delighted in mailing books across the Atlantic and inviting friends to visit Nairobi. "Don't listen to me," he would joke. "I'm the sort of friend who encourages you to do crazy things."

He later earned a master's degree in Refugee and Forced Migration Studies at Worcester College, Oxford. Following his studies, he served as an editor for Africa Arguments and as communications officer for the Oxford Africa Initiative. 

At the time of his death, he was pursuing a master's degree in Global Financial Journalism at City St George's, University of London, continuing the lifelong pursuit of knowledge that had begun years earlier with a handful of worn books in a refugee camp library

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