Franke Visiting Fellows

Jennifer Makumbi introduces her forthcoming pan-African novel, Alkebulon: The Lions Return, followed by a reading and discussion.

Civilizations are living things: they are born, they grow and die. Nations too, rise and fall. Europe and its spawned nations are declining. Africa cannot afford to stumble into global power as if drunk.

Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi is a Ugandan fiction writer and author of The First Woman (A Girl Is a Body of Water in US/Canada) which won the Jhalak Prize 2021, was shortlisted for the Diverse Book Award 2021, the Encore Prize 2021, the James Tait Black Prize 2021 and longlisted for the Aspen Words Literary Prize 2021. Her first novel, Kintu, won the Kwani Manuscript Project (2013); the Prix Transfuge du meilleur premier roman (2019); was shortlisted for Edward Stanford Travel Writing Award (2019) and longlisted for the Prix Médicis (2019). Her collection of short stories, Manchester Happened (Let’s Tell This Story Properly in US/Canada) was shortlisted for the Harper’s Bazaar short story competition in 2019 and longlisted for the Edge Hill Short Story Prize. To work on her current project, Makumbi was Writer-in-Residence at NIAS-KNAW (the Netherlands) in 2021, Artist-in-Berlin DAAD in 2022, and Artist in Residence at STIAS Stellenbosch 2023. As a Franke Visiting Fellow in 2024–25 she hopes to complete the Pan-African novel, Alkebulan: The Lions Return. She is a recipient of the prestigious Windham-Campbell Prize (2018). She also won the Global Commonwealth Short story prize in 2014. She has a Ph.D. from Lancaster University and has taught in several universities in the United Kingdom.