Jennifer Makumbi
Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi (b 1967, Uganda) is a novelist and short-story writer living in Manchester, UK. She has a PhD from Lancaster University, and has taught creative writing and English for 10 years in British universities.
Her first novel, Kintu, became an award-winning debut which vividly reimagines Uganda's history through the cursed bloodline of the Kintu clan. Her short story Let’s Tell This Story Properly won the Commonwealth Short Story Prize in 2014.
Makumbi was awarded the prestigious Windham-Campbell Prize for Fiction in 2018.
Kintu has been hailed as the “great Ugandan novel”, and deservedly so..With a novel that is inventive in scope, masterful in execution, she does for Ugandan literature what Chinua Achebe did for Nigerian writing.
LESLEY NNEKA ARIMAH, THE GUARDIAN
With an extraordinarily ambitious and agile narrative voice that blends traditional oral storytelling with folk tales, mythology, and biblical elements, Makumbi delivers an incisive critique of contemporary Ugandan class, politics, and religion.
WINDHAM CAMPBELL PRIZE
A cursed family
Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi, Tomm Kristiansen.
What is literary quality?
Ane Farsethås, Jennifer Makumbi, Kari Marstein, Daniel Medin, Peter Nielsen, Eirik Vassenden.
Listening Post: Guo, Makumbi and Ugrešić
Xiaolu Guo, Jennifer Makumbi, Dubravka Ugrešić