Author Biography
Writer and politician Grace Ogot was born in 1930 in the Central Nyanza area of Kenya. Trained as a nurse while a young woman, Ogot worked in Uganda and England before returning to Kenya. As a young and upcoming writer, Ogot first entered the Kenyan literary scene in the early 1960s when she began to publish stories in the African journal Black Orpheus. Many of these stories, of which “The Green Leaves” is one, later became part of the collection Land of Thunder, published in 1968. Her 1966 novel, The Promised Land, was the first novel published by a woman by the influential East African Publishing House. Since then, she has published two other novels, The Graduate, in 1980, and The Strange Bride (1989), which was written in Luo, Ogot’s native language, and translated into English and Kiswahili. She has also published two other volumes of short stories in English.
Her most recent literary contributions have been written in her native language and have been received by the Luo people in Kenya with much enthusiasm. Several of these are historical novels that attempt to document the early history of her people, the Luo, and contribute to the growth of vernacular literatures produced by and for specific populations in Africa rather than for an international audience. Her books in Luo continue the storytelling heritage of its people and also provide a version of history that is Afrocentric rather than Eurocentric. As Ogot claims in an interview with Don Burness, “It is my hope that people can have proper respect for their own language and will learn it so that it will not be lost and swallowed up by English and Kiswahili.”
Besides her career as a writer, Ogot has been a tutor, a midwife, a flight attendant, a journalist for the BBC, a community development officer, and most notably an assistant minister of the Kenyan government. She has taken an active interest in the cultural and political concerns of Kenya and was the founding chair of the Writer’s Association of Kenya.