Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi

Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi is a Ugandan novelist and short story writer born in Uganda. She studied at Makerere University and completed her PhD at Lancaster University in England, where she lives and teaches. Her debut novel Kintu (2014), originally published by Kwani? in Kenya, is a sprawling multigenerational saga set in Uganda from 1750 to the present, weaving together history, myth, and contemporary life. It was revised and published internationally by OneWorld in 2018. The First Woman (2020, OneWorld) is her second novel, following a young woman coming of age in 1970s rural Uganda who seeks the secret knowledge of women healers. It won the Jhalak Prize in 2021 and received wide critical acclaim for its immersive world-building and its feminist reimagining of Ganda oral tradition. Her story collection Let's Tell This Story Properly (2021) won the Commonwealth Short Story Prize. Makumbi is one of the foremost voices in Ugandan literature in English. Her work engages deeply with precolonial Ganda history and cosmology, challenging colonial and postcolonial representations of African societies.