A gloomy past springs Anena to literary glory

Awarded. Left to right: Authors; Ms Harriet Anena, Mr Wole Soyinka and Prof Tanure Ojaide during the ceremony in Lagos, Nigeria on Sunday. Ms Anena won the Wole Soyinka Prize for Literature 2018 jointly with Prof Ojaide. Courtesy photo

What you need to know:

  • During her Senior Four vacation, Anena dared to enter a poetry competition organised by Acholi Religious Leaders Peace Initiative, a grouping of clerics at the time invested in finding a lasting peaceful solution to the LRA insurgency.
  • Ms Beverley Nambozo Nsengiyunva, the founder of Babishai Niwe (BN) Poetry Foundation, which has published some of Anena’s poems in an anthology of poetry from poets of Africa, summed up the delight.

Kampala. Harriet Anena’s literary voyage wraps innate flair and endurance that ironically flowered in the dungeon of agony.
In the backwaters of Gulu, a northern Uganda district then ravaged by Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) war, Anena as a child found words roll off her tongue with ease.

As a student and teenager, her writing acumen was sharp and distinct. Class readings and writing exposed Anena to poetry and endeared her to it as an attractive genre of Literature while still in Senior One.
The promise of education was undercut for the much of the northern Uganda population by the indiscriminate slayings by rebels and, by some accounts, even government soldiers.
Anena’s early life oscillated between hope and despair. Deprivation added to the millstones. She remained unrelenting. She began to ink her tortured and confusing thoughts about life.

Writing journey
During her Senior Four vacation, Anena dared to enter a poetry competition organised by Acholi Religious Leaders Peace Initiative, a grouping of clerics at the time invested in finding a lasting peaceful solution to the LRA insurgency.
She won. The prize was full tuition for her A-Level studies. The brains of the daughter of Acholi, as some friends fondly call Anena, were freed to power through university.

“The realisation that poetry is rewarding, made me stick to it until 2012 when l ventured into fiction writing,” she said.
She first cut a niche as a journalist based upcountry, before scaling the ladder to Deputy Chief Sub Editor of the Daily Monitor.
Her love for the written word never atrophied when she left the newsroom to work as Online Content Producer at the African Centre for Media Excellence (ACME). Politics, relationships, social life and the war in northern Uganda remain the mainstays of her lettering.
By 2014, Anena felt ripe enough to put her poems together in a book. A Nation in Labour was born!

By her account, the book is a social conscience collection of poetry that tackles politics, relationships, the LRA war and select aspects of a Ugandan’s everyday life struggles.
It just isn’t a title that arrests attention. It catapulted Anena from among a battery of gifted African writers to continental stardom when she on Sunday night won the Wole Soyinka Prize for Literature in Africa, 2018.

“These are poems that navigate a nation’s course through pain towards hope, poems that paint a picture of the giant politician, the restless citizen, the clueless youth, those struggling to heal from life’s scratches,” Margaret Busby, the chair of award judges, said in a verdict on A Nation in Labour.

Anena was a joint award winner with Nigerian Professor and accomplished author, Tanure Ojaide, meaning she will bag $5,000 (Shs18.5m) or half of the full $10,000 prize cash.
“[Anena’s] poetry shows that she is headed somewhere,” Mr Bob Kisiki, a keen reader and follower of Anena’s work, told this newspaper last night. “Winning the Wole Soyinka prize is a big boost not only for her as a poet, but for Ugandan writers, who ought to know that their stage stretches far and farther than Uganda...this makes Anena someone to look out for and look up to.”

A new world unveiled for the budding poet when she found herself not just winning the prize, but sharing the rostrum in Nigeria on Sunday night with Wole Soyinka, Africa’s first Nobel Laureate in literature.
“I’m grateful for this recognition, which will always remind me that opposing voices may never recede, that writing will never be as easy; but listening to conviction and positivity, is a step towards inscribing literary footprints that won’t get easily erased,” she said in her acceptance speech. In Kampala, the spread of happiness was infectious among poets.

Ms Beverley Nambozo Nsengiyunva, the founder of Babishai Niwe (BN) Poetry Foundation, which has published some of Anena’s poems in an anthology of poetry from poets of Africa, summed up the delight.
“We are ecstatic; it is a magnificent stride for Uganda, for women and for the continent (Africa). It gives us the firm belief that all of us should publish our work [to make] a permanent mark of who we are as poets.”

Anena, who said she never set out to write a book or author one for awards, has a feather of feat to share with other writers.
“Setting out to write specifically for prizes is atrocious,” she told this newspaper, adding, “Read. Read. Read. Write. Even a sentence a day is something; it gets easier and better by the day. There’s no escaping it.”