Interviews Matthew Davis Ugandan novelist and short-story writer Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi’s first novel, Kintu, won the Kwani Manuscript Project in 2013 and was longlisted for the Etisalat Prize in 2014. She was awarded the 2014 Commonwealth Short-Story Prize for her story Lets Tell This Story Properly, published by Granta, and the prestigious Windham-Campbell Prize for Fiction 2018 to support her writing. Her first full story collection, Manchester Happened, was published by Oneworld in May 2019. Retitled Let’s Tell This Story Properly, the collection was published in the US in July 2019. She lives in Manchester with her husband and son and lectures in creative writing at Manchester Metropolitan University. While Makumbi was a fellow at the Alan Cheuse International Writers Center at George Mason University this past spring, she talked with Matthew Davis, the center’s founding director. Here they discuss how westerners and Africans read African literature differently, writing for Ugandans, and how eighteen years in England has changed her. Matthew Davis: Jennifer, welcome. I want to start by discussing your novel, Kintu, which is in many ways a modern classic of world literature. It begins in 1750, when Kintu Kidda sets out for the capital to pledge allegiance to the new leader of the Buganda kingdom. The novel follows the descendants of Kintu as they struggle with a curse he unleashed as he made his way to the capital in the... Continue reading at 'World Literature Today'
[ World Literature Today | 2019-08-06 13:42:31 UTC ]
When I was nine years old my mother temporarily moved from our home in Los Angeles to New York City for a job in private banking. The family lore is that I wrote her letters, including short stories about a family of hamsters. I don’t remember what I was feeling then or why I did […] Continue reading at Literrary Hub
[ Literrary Hub | 2025-03-25 08:58:26 UTC ]
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Eight unpublished stories by the To Kill a Mockingbird author will be issued later this year as The Land of Sweet ForeverNever-before-seen short stories by Harper Lee will be published later this year, it has been announced.Eight short stories written before the author started the novel that... Continue reading at The Guardian
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Every week, our weekly magazine The Commuter publishes a new work of flash fiction, poetry, and graphic narrative. For Black History Month, we’re looking to the archives for some of our favorite poetry and stories by Black writers, all available to read for free online. From Tara Campbell’s... Continue reading at Electric Literature
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Mavis Gallant wrote short stories full of brutal humor that examined the hell of other people. Continue reading at The New York Times
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Lou Mathews, author of "L.A. Breakdown" and "Shaky Town," is back with "Hollywoodski," a novelized collection of short stories about a faded screenwriter. Continue reading at Los Angeles Times
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Mexican Writer Guadalupe Nettel to Headline Puterbaugh Festival at OU, by the Editors of WLT News and Events [email protected] Mon, 01/13/2025 - 09:20 Author photo by Germán NájeraThe 2025 Puterbaugh Lit Fest will return to the University of... Continue reading at World Literature Today
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My first book had been something of an accident—two or three short stories that ran together unexpectedly, hit the 25,000-word mark, and found a publisher almost immediately. It happened so fast, I hadn’t really had time to think about what I was doing. Like a lot of indie presses in 2015, my... Continue reading at Literrary Hub
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Late in 1933, Dylan Thomas started writing a new short story. “The theme of the story I dreamed in a nightmare,” he wrote to a friend. “If successful, if the words fit to the thoughts, it will be one of the most ghastly short stories ever written.” Thomas was possessed, in part, by rejection.... Continue reading at Literrary Hub
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In the 1990s, when I was a student at the newly formed Asian Pacific American Studies Department at NYU, the artist in residence at the time, David Henry Hwang, visited my class and spoke about Bruce Lee and the film The Joy Luck Club. He said something that I will never forget: “One... Continue reading at Literrary Hub
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