As part of Cyprus@60, an online festival to celebrate the 60th anniversary of the establishment and independence of the Republic of Cyprus organised by the Cyprus High Commission in the UK in October 2020, Commonwealth Writers organised a conversation between 2019 Short Story Prize winner Contantia Soteriou, translator Lina Protopapa, and novelist Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi.
Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi
Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi is a Ugandan novelist and short story writer. She has a PhD from Lancaster University. Her first novel, Kintu (Oneworld, 2018), won the Kwani? Manuscript Project in 2013, and was longlisted for the Etisalat Prize in 2014. She won the 2014 Commonwealth Short Story Prize for ‘Let’s Tell This Story Properly’, which featured in her short story collection, Manchester Happened (Oneworld, 2019), and her second novel, The First Woman, was published by Oneworld in October 2020. She was awarded the prestigious Windham Campbell Prize for Fiction in 2018, and lives in Manchester where she lectures in Creative Writing at Manchester Metropolitan University.
Constantia Soteriou
Constantia Soteriou is an award-winning author born in Nicosia. Patakis Publishers have published three of her books: Aishe Goes on Vacation, which received the Athens Prize for Literature, Voices made of Soil, which was shortlisted for the Cyprus Literature awards, and Bitter Country, shortlisted for the European Union prize for Literature. She has written plays for independent stages and for the Cyprus Theatre Organization. In 2019 Constantia won the Commonwealth Short Story prize for her story ‘Death Customs’.
Lina Protopapa
Lina Protopapa lives in Nicosia, where she works as a translator and cultural critic. Her translation of ‘Death Customs’ from the Greek received the 2019 Commonwealth Short Story Prize, while her translation of Nikolas Kyriakou’s ‘The Debt’ was shortlisted for the same prize in 2020.
