Goretti Kyomuhendo

Goretti Kyomuhendo is one of Uganda’s leading novelists and founding director of the African Writers https://africanwriterstrust.org/ and Tubaze African Books Online Bookshop. She is the author of four novels: The First Daughter (1996), Secrets No More (1999), which won the Uganda National Literary Award for Best Novel in the same year; Waiting, published by The Feminist Press in New York, in 2007, and translated into Spanish, in 2022 and Whispers from Vera, republished in 2023.

In 2014, she published the Essential Handbook for African Creative Writers. She has also published several children’s books and short stories, including Lost and Found, published in New Daughters of Africa: An International Anthology of Writing by Women of African Descent (2019), which was edited by Margaret Busby.

Kyomuhendo holds an MA degree in Creative Writing from the University of KwaZulu, Natal, South Africa, and taught creative writing in the same university in 2004. The first Ugandan woman to receive the International Writing Program Fellowship at the University of Iowa, in the US, Goretti has been recognised for her work as a writer and literary activist nationally and internationally, and has participated in numerous forums worldwide.

In 2021, she was appointed to chair an international panel of five judges for the Caine Prize for African Writing. She also served as one of the five global judges for the Commonwealth Book Prize in 2012. In 2019, she was featured among the 100 Most Influential Africans by the UK-based, bestselling Pan-African Magazine: New African. Kyomuhendo is a founding member of FEMRITE – Uganda Women Writers’ Association and Publishing House – and served as its first director for ten years (1997-2007.)