Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi | ‘Stories have such power you cannot imagine’
Jennifer N. Makumbi and Aleid Truijens Selected as Writers-in-Residence 2020/21
June 24, 2020
New York Times: Set in Uganda, This Coming-of-Age Story Contains Universal Themes
September 10, 2020
The First Woman, Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi’s powerful feminist novel about a headstrong young woman’s coming-of-age in 1970s Uganda, has had a long and fraught path to publication.
When the Ugandan-born author speaks to me over the phone from her home in Manchester, she recalls that she first started writing it in an exercise book while she was teaching literature at a high school in Kampala, back in 1998. But she soon set it aside, dissatisfied. When Makumbi came to Britain in 2001, aged 34, determined to pursue a career as a writer and to study creative writing at Manchester Metropolita…
