Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi is featured in Gary Younge's My Year of Reading African Women

Jennifer Makumbi

She is a a Ugandan novelist and short story writer. Between 2010-2016 she was an associate lecturer at Lancaster University. Her first novel, Kintu, won the Kwani Manuscript Project 2013 and was published in 2014 by Kwani Trust (Kenya), by Transit (USA) 2017 and Oneworld (UK/Commonwealth) in 2018. Jennifer’s short story, Lets Tell This Story Properly won the overall Commonwealth Short story prize 2014. Her collection of short stories, Love Made In Manchester (working title) will be published by Transit (USA) and Oneworld (UK/Commonwealth) in Spring 2019. Her second novel, The Women, (Working title) will come out in 2020 published by Oneworld. Jennifer is a recipient of the Windham-Campbell Literature.

Gary Younge, in his article for The Guardian, writes that Kintu, Makumbi's first novel, published in the UK in January, is the story of a curse passed through generations in what is now Uganda. It starts with the mob killing of a man mistaken for a thief and then stretches back to the story of a powerful governor who unleashes a curse that reverberates through the ages when he kills his own son. Makumbi’s prose style is as haunting as the storyline. 

Read more here.