[Pagecast] Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi chats to Uhuru Portia Phalafala about her epic and deeply personal novel The First Woman
More about the book!

In this episode of Pagecast, prize-winning author Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi chats to Uhuru Portia Phalafala about her second novel, The First Woman.

Pagecast offers you insider interviews with recently published authors, looking into the process of writing, exploring the narratives within and providing you with the story behind the story.

Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi is a Ugandan novelist and short story writer. Her 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 ‘Let’s Tell This Story Properly’, which featured in her first short story collection, Manchester Happened. She was awarded the prestigious Windham-Campbell Prize for Fiction in 2018. In 2020, she was selected as one of 100 Most Influential Africans of 2020 by New African magazine.

At once epic and deeply personal, The First Woman is an intoxicating mix of Ugandan folklore and modern feminism that will linger in the memory long after the final page.

About the book

As Kirabo enters her teens, questions begin to gnaw at her – questions that the adults in her life will do anything to ignore. Where is the mother she has never known? And why would she choose to leave her daughter behind?

Inquisitive, headstrong, and unwilling to take no for an answer, Kirabo sets out to find the truth for herself.

Her search will take her away from the safety of her prosperous Ugandan family, plunging her into a very different world of magic, tradition, and the haunting legend of ‘The First Woman’.