Biography

Ruth Mukwana is a Ugandan fiction writer living with her daughter in New York. Her short stories have appeared in several magazines including the Black Warriors Review where her story, Taboo was a runner-up in the BWR 2017 fiction contest. The fiction judge, Nicola Griffith wrote this about Taboo: Like the winning story, “Taboo” immediately gives us a connection to the narrator: visceral and particular descriptions of a boy in a refugee camp. The story—the characters in their situation—never wavers in its assurance. The writer very economically sets up a series of very human conflicts—of age, culture, gender, privilege—without resorting to easy cliché. They leave the reader to ache with ten-year-old Timothy and, alongside him, wonder what will happen.

Her short stories are set in Uganda against the backdrop of conflict, poverty, and totalitarian regimes, and explore what happens when women rise up and dismantle the status quo and become heroes of their own stories. They’re narrated by a variety of women: a mother fighting for her survival from domestic abuse, a daughter of a military giant stages a coup, and a little girl lives and attempts to overcome her stigma as the town witch. These stories capture the way in which politics, deprivation, dictatorships and war test the bonds between family and particularly mothers and daughters. These characters also help us imagine an alternative reality where patriarchy and dictatorships are confronted—and wrestled to the ground by the matriarchy.

In addition to her writing, she hosts a podcast, Stories and Humanitarian Action which discusses how fiction can be used to raise awareness on humanitarian crises and drive action with a particular focus on war.

She has had a long career as an aid worker with extensive international experience in Africa, Asia, and the Middle East, and at the United Nations Headquarters in New York and Geneva. A big part of her job with the United Nations is to communicate to the world the impact of war and natural disasters on an individual(s). This isn’t an easy task. Her desire to write these stories is therefore born out of a need to delve into the complex lives of characters and narrators, using poverty and conflict and post-conflict as a backdrop. Fiction offers her a great tool especially as she’s a firm believer that all art should teach us something.

Ruth is a graduate of the Bennington Writing Seminars (MFA) and holds a Bachelors degree in Law from Makerere University in Uganda. She was a 2020 Center For Fiction NYC Emerging Writers Fellow, a 2022 Bennington Alumni Fellow, 2022 UN Fellow at Batten and 2022 Model United Nations Key Note Speaker.

She is currently querying her collection of short stories and her work in progress is a novel that explores trauma, loss and memory.