The Witness of Nina Mvungi and Other Stories - Paperback
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The Witness of Nina Mvungi is a collection of seven stories by contemporary Swahili writer Esther Karin Mngodo translated by the award winning Translator from the Swahili, Jay Boss Rubin. It is the first full-length book of fiction by award-winning contemporary Tanzanian author Esther Karin Mngodo. Its seven stories, translated from Swahili, range in style from lyrical realism to speculative fiction and Afrofuturism. The stories all share a distinct voice and focus on the feminine, and some are linked not just thematically but in terms of plot. Whether depicting a world of spirits behind the proverbial curtain, a dystopian future in which the sun is about to expire, or a sweltering-hot present-day fish market, Mngodo's tantalizing fiction pushes beyond allegory and didacticism into the rich ambiguity of lived experience. She portrays intimate encounters between a wide variety of characters with compassion and wit, paying particular attention to class and gender dynamics. Some of her stories appear to turn on secrets suddenly revealed--but more than plot resolution, they rely on mutual entanglement.
Esther Karin Mngodo was born in Moscow, Russia, in 1986. Bilingual in Swahili and English, she works across genres and languages as a fiction writer, poet, translator, journalist, editor and feminist publisher. In 2014, Mngodo was the winner of the inaugural Ebrahim Hussein Poetry Prize, one of Tanzania's major literary awards. Her prose writing has been featured in The Goddess of Mtwara and Other Stories: The Caine Prize for African Writing 2017, Imbiza Journal, The Citizen, The Chanzo and other publications. She is the author of the poetry collection Jinsi ya Kurudi Nyumbani (How to Return Home), and the founder and publisher of UMBU, an online literary journal for women who write in Swahili. Esther is also an Open Society Fellow. She lives in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, with her daughter, Jasmine.
Rubin, Jay Boss: -Jay Boss Rubin is a writer and Swahili-English translator from Portland, Oregon. His book-length translations include Rosa Mistika by Euphrase Kezilahabi (Yale University Press) and New Virus by Halfani Sudy (forthcoming from University of Georgia Press), and he contributed to Two Lines Press's collection, No Edges: Swahili Stories. His translation and translation-adjacent work has also appeared in Asymptote, The Common, The Hopkins Review, Living in Languages, Northwest Review and other outlets. He was the recipient of a 2022 PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grant and the 2024 Loose Translation Award. He is a proud graduate of the Queens College MFA Program in Creative Writing and Literary Translation, and he currently serves as Managing Editor of Portland Tennis Courterly.
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