After five years of promoting African ideas through arts and culture, the Centre for African Cultural Excellence takes a moment to reflect on its history as well as the literary history of Uganda. The co-editors, Madhu Krishnan and Bwesigye Bwa Mwesigire write, "The anthology also comes out of a desire: to showcase the kinds of stories young people across Uganda are interested in telling and offer opportunities for imagining other lives and other minds." This anthology brings together the voices of young emerging Ugandan writers between the ages of eighteen and thirty-five to explore and interrogate the theme of violence. Through workshops and mentorship, what emerged were stories which explore the legacies of armed conflict, stories which focus on intergenerational and family conflict, stories which look at conflicts between the genders, and stories which look at conflict within the self.
About the Author: MADHU KRISHNAN is Senior Lecturer of 20th/21st Century Postcolonial Writing at the University of Bristol. She is the author of Contemporary African Literature in English: Global Locations, Postcolonial Identifications (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014). Her work centres on African writing and cultural production in English and French, with a particular interest in material cultures and the shifting horizons of 'the literary'. She has edited or co-edited special issues of Wasafiri, Journal of Postcolonial Writing and Research in African Literatures which examine print activism in 21st century Africa; postcolonial space; and the concept of the post-nation. In 2018, she will publish her second monograph, Writing Spatiality in West Africa: Colonial Legacies and the Anglophone / Francophone Novel (part of James Currey Press's African Articulations series) and a minigraph, Contingent Canons: African Literature and the Politics of Location (Cambridge University Press). BWESIGYE BWA MWESIGIRE is the cofounder of the Centre for African Cultural Excellence, which curates the Writivism Literary Initiative. He has published commentary, academic research, fiction and poetry in various periodicals and blogs including African Arguments, Chimurenga Chronic, This is Africa, Africa in Words, Africa is a Country, Saraba among others. He studied Law at Makerere University and Security at the African Leadership Centre (King's College, London). He is a recipient of various fellowships among them the Harry Frank Guggenheim Young African Scholars Award. He is currently studying for a doctorate in English Literature at Cornell University.