Nansubuga makumbi5/21/2023 ![]() By then, she’d published her first novel, Kintu, which won her the prestigious Windham-Campbell Prize. ![]() She put the novel away in 2008 and didn’t pick it up again until eight years later. Even after resubmitting new drafts in 20, multiple agents said no. Makumbi continued to work on the novel after her MFA and sent it out to agents in 2003. I gave up on being wealthy, but I had to succeed.” “All of the money I made, I put into my writing. She had been teaching at an international school there but moved to Manchester in 2001 to enroll in a graduate program in creative writing. “When I left Uganda, I sold everything I had,” Makumbi says. That she can’t stop smiling on this Zoom call isn’t surprising: A Girl Is a Body of Water is giving Makumbi her starring moment, with the novel attracting buzz in publishing circles and drawing raves in early reviews. Behind her are stacks of books growing up like trees from the floor. ![]() “I was so close to giving up,” says Makumbi, grinning, her yellow knit head wrap matching the cheery yellow walls of her living room in Manchester, England, where she also works as an adjunct professor. What she didn’t anticipate is that she would revise the novel on and off for 20 years, perfecting the sweeping multigenerational tale while working full-time in nursing homes and airport security. ![]() When Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi began writing her ambitious novel A Girl Is a Body of Water in 1998, she knew it would center on a young woman’s coming of age in Uganda. ![]()
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