Lancaster University African Studies Group

Conference 2010: ‘Africa: Cultural Translations’

The conference took place from 21-22 May 2010 at Lancaster University.  It was organised by Lancaster University African Studies Group in association with the Centre for Transcultural Writing and Research.  One of the main events on the afternoon of the first day way a reading by Goretti Kyomuhendo and a discussion with Graham Mort in the Chair.  Click here to read the whole of the Conference Programme.  Read more about Goretti.

 

Goretti Kyomuhendo

Goretti Kyomuhendo was born in 1965 and grew up in Hoima, western Uganda. She currently lives in London. She holds an MA in creative writing from the University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban, South Africa.

Goretti is a founding member of FEMRITE – The Ugandan Women Writers’ Association and Publishing House, and worked as its first Programmes Coordinator for ten years (1997-2007).

In 2004, Goretti was a tutor in the department of English at the University of Kwazulu- Natal, teaching and assessing creative writing second-year students.

She has been commissioned to undertake several writing consultancies including by UNICEF, to develop a script for a multi-media package, based on children in conflict situations, which was later published as an illustrated comic book entitled Sara and the Boy Soldier, in 2000.

Goretti is currently the director of the newly - established African Writers’ Trust, a body that seeks to coordinate and link African writers in the Diaspora with those on the continent. It is based in London and operational in Uganda.

In 1997, Goretti was the first Ugandan woman to receive an International Writing Program fellowship at the University of Iowa. She has since been invited to participate in various international literary and academic conferences to read from and talk about her writing. Her work has taken her to France, Germany, Netherlands, Rwanda, Zimbabwe, Tanzania, Brazil, Malaysia, Thailand and United States.

Goretti’s first novel, The First Daughter, was published in Uganda in 1996. Secrets no More followed in 1999, and it won the Uganda National Literary Award for best novel of the year in the same year. In 2002, she published a novella entitled Whispers from Vera, which was serialised in The Monitor, the Ugandan based newspaper. Her most recent novel is Waiting, published by The Feminist Press in New York in 2007.

Goretti has also published a number of short stories and essays, which have appeared in publications and anthologies in Uganda, South Africa and United States. In 2008, Goretti was commissioned by Macmillan, UK, to write two children’s stories on HIV -AIDS. They were published the same year, and are now used as texts in primary schools in Africa.

She is currently working on a novel on the theme of Immigration.

 

 

Centre for Transcultural Writing and Research, County College, Lancaster University, LA1 4YD, UK