About the author… Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi

She grew up in Uganda and started writing plays and poetry as a teenager. She now lives in northern England with her husband and son, and lectures in creative writing. This is her second novel.

This novel was inspired by… Initially, I was inspired to write about a happy traditional African childhood to challenge the images of starving, fly-ridden, malnourished, dirty-water-drinking African children you see in Western media. But as I wrote, I started to think about how traditional stories hide meaning. I realised that women of old wrote their thoughts in codes, thus the need to decode them.

It was exciting taking the reader through these traditional tales and then, later, showing how what they said unfolded in our lives.

The most challenging thing about writing it was… Making non-African readers see the world the way Kirabo sees it, especially time. It was difficult to show the world that when you live at the equator, time is so different.

My writing habits are… I’m an undisciplined writer. I do not have a routine. I don’t know when to take a break. Sometimes I write till I’m exhausted, then there are days when I do not write at all. I carry a notebook on me. Ideas have a bad habit of occurring to me in the most inconvenient places, at awkward times. I write too much and spend a lot of time editing. I may throw away a quarter of the initial writing. I take a long time to complete a novel. To me, thinking and talking about the story are important processes of writing. I need a lot of time for that, too.