Kigali-based Huza Press has a new residency for writers and starts a new literary series on May 15, 2021.
Huza Press, a publisher with several books by writers in the East African region based in Kigali, was founded by Louise Umutoni-Bower in 2015. One of the unique things that this innovative organisation is its initiatives to shine a light on writing in Rwanda and others in the region. One of these was the Huza Press Prize for Fiction which was the only literary award from the East Africa for a few years. In the years it ran, it was won by Raïssa Kamaliza (2016), as well as Darla Rudakubana and Daniel Rafiki (2015).
Another initiative is KigaliLit where writers interacted with the Kigali literary audience. That initiative which happened in 2018 to 2019 featured among others Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi, Perpétue Miganda, Boniface Mwangi and the Caine Prize writers.
After taking time to publish several titles the Kigali-based publisher is back with two new initiatives. They are;
1) Huza Press and Goethe-Institut Kigali Writing Residency
In a new collaboration between Huza Press and the Goethe-Institut Kigali, the two have announced a four-week writers’ residency in Kigali (Rwanda) in September 2021. The purpose of this residency is to support writers as they complete or make significant advances with a work-in-progress novel manuscript. The collaborators state on the new initiative say, “We are particularly passionate about literature as a space for opening up conversations about gender, its modes of construction, histories, representation and relationality to power: the theme of this residency is therefore writing gender.”
For more information on the residency which has a May 16 deadline, please click here.
2) Huza Press in collaboration with Authors.Café (UK)
Huza Press (Kigali) and Authors.Café (Devon) have announced a new collaborative literary programme featuring book launches and creative writing workshops. In the event, Yolande Mukagasana will be in conversation with Zoe Norridge and Kristen Stern about the process of writing and translating her powerful testimony Not My Time to Die. Not My Time to Die was the first Rwandan-authored literary testimony of the Genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda published in French in 1997 and now available in English for the first time.
For more information on the event which happens on Saturday, May 15, please click here.
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