Austin Bukenya

Austin Bukenya (born 10 February 1944) is a Ugandan poet, playwright, novelist and academic administrator. He is the author of the novel The People's Bachelor, and a play, The Bride. He has taught languages, literature and drama at Makerere University in Uganda and universities in the UK, Tanzania and Kenya since the late 1960s. He has also held residences at universities in Rwanda and Germany. Bukenya is also a literary critic, novelist, poet and dramatist. An accomplished stage and screen actor, he was for several years Director of the Creative and Performing Arts Centre at Kenyatta University, Nairobi.

Early life and education Bukenya, who prefers to be called Mwalimu, was born in 1944 in Masaka town, Southern Uganda, where his father worked as a policeman. His family later moved to Kitukutwe 15 miles from Kampala. His father was a staunch Catholic who would narrate biblical stories which he would alternate with his mother's folk stories. According to Bukenya, these stories inspired his imagination.

He attended Gayaza primary school and joined Kisubi Seminary where he studied three languages, French, English and Latin. This would soon inform his literary thinking and future academic career. His growing passion for literature was soon cemented at Namilyango College, where he took his O- and A-level exams. In 1965, he went to Dar es Salaam University where he continued to nurture his keen interest in Language and Linguistics in addition to a growing interest in Kiswahili. He studied the Language Linguistics and Literature and Education (LLLE) for his undergraduate course. Most of Bukenya's writings are in Kiswahili, he attributes this to his grandmother, whose roots can be traced back to Dar es Salaam. He was also inspired by linguistic teachers including Wilson Whitely, a British author famous for his book Kiswahili: the Rising of a National Language. Bukenya joined Makerere as a postgraduate student in 1968 and later developed the oral literature course.

Published works

Novels

Plays

Literary Criticism .

Educational books , , with Jane Nandwa and muyigai Gachwanga , with Wanjikũ Mũkabi Kabĩra and Duncan Okoth-Okombo , with Arnold Curtis and James Park

, with Jane Nandwa

Anthologies

Poems Naturally, in "A Dancer's Challenge" in Badilishapoetry, 2014 "I met a thief"