News | Friday, 14th September 2018

Author and lecturer Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi receives illustrious literary prize

Author picked up Windham Campbell Prize at Yale University

Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi
Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi

An author and University lecturer has travelled to America to pick up one of the world’s most prestigious literary prizes.

Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi, who joined Manchester Writing School at Manchester Metropolitan University as Lecturer in Creative Writing in June, was awarded one of the eight 2018 Windham Campbell Prizes by Yale University.

With each recipient receiving $165,000 (£127,500), it is one of the richest literary awards in the world – second only to the Nobel Prize. The awards ceremony took place at Yale University this week.

Makumbi is a Ugandan novelist and short story writer whose debut novel Kintu won the Manuscript Project Award in 2013. She is one of eight writers from around the world to be selected for this year’s Windham Campbell Prizes – and the only winner to have published just one full-length work. The Windham Campbell Prizes were established in 2011, named after writer Donald Windham, whose endowment led to the creation of the awards, and his partner Sandy M Campbell.

Being a recipient of the Windham-Campbell Prize opens doors you didn’t know existed and gives you freedoms you thought were out of reach. It is hard to explain the extent of this.

Organisers say that the awards “call attention to literary achievement and provide writers with the opportunity to focus on their work independent of financial concerns”.

Prizes are awarded in the categories of fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and drama, open to English-language writers at all stages of their careers from anywhere in the world, so long as they have one published book or one professionally-produced play to their credit.

Nominations are put forward by a range of literary figures from writing, publishing, academia and beyond, before panels comprising Yale professors and external figures shortlist and decide the final winners.

Makumbi opens up a bold and innovatory vista in African letters, encompassing ancient wounds that disquiet the present, and offering the restitution to be found in memory and ritual.

Makumbi said: “Being a recipient of the Windham-Campbell Prize opens doors you didn’t know existed and gives you freedoms you thought were out of reach. It is hard to explain the extent of this.“

Praising Kintu’s “extraordinarily ambitious and agile narrative voice that blends traditional oral storytelling with folk tales, mythology and biblical elements”, the Windham Campbell Prizes judges said Makumbi “delivers an incisive critique of contemporary Ugandan class, politics and religion…charting new possibilities for the future of the African novel”.

They added: “Makumbi opens up a bold and innovatory vista in African letters, encompassing ancient wounds that disquiet the present, and offering the restitution to be found in memory and ritual.”

Following the awards ceremony, Makumbi appeared at the Windham-Campbell Festival at Yale between September 12 and 14 and will be appearing at New York City’s Brooklyn Book Festival, which takes place September 15 and 16.

Makumbi’s collection of short stories Manchester Happened (working title), will be published in May 2019 by Oneworld in the UK and the Commonwealth and in July 2019 by Transit in the USA. Her second novel, The Women (working title), will be released in 2020, published by Oneworld.

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