Christopher Okemwa's Chubot, the Cursed & Other Stories is a collection that captures society's realities as played by characters rendered in these stories.
A recurring theme is the role of women in society and their longing for equity, their triumph often depicted by heroines catapulted by circumstances rather than deliberate action of society to engineer their success. Women's humility is felt through the stories, even in the face of courage to confront taboos and traditions with society contributing little towards their success. Indeed, women's triumphs are captured as happening where men fall short.
Many of these stories raise the question of why society lacks a systematic approach to women's empowerment.
Chubot, the Cursed One, and Other Stories was selected in the UN SDG Book Club Africa Chapter as a Club title in the Social Development Goal (SDG) number 5 - Gender Equality
Author Biography:
Christopher Okemwa is a literature lecturer at Kisii University, Kenya. He has a Ph.D. in performance poetry from Moi University, Kenya. He is the founder and current director of Kistrech International Poetry festival in Kenya (www.kistrechpoetry.org). His novellas, Sabina and the Mystery of the Ogre won the Canadian Burt Award for African Literature in 2015 while its sequel, Sabina the Rain Girl, has been picked for the UN SDG Africa Book Club. Okemwa has written eight books of poetry with some of the poems translated into Armenian, Chinese, Greek, Norwegian, Finnish, Hungarian, Arabic, Polish, Chinese, Nepalese, Turkish, Russian, Spanish, Catalan and Serbian. He has also translated four literary works of international poets from English to Kiswahili. He is the editor of Musings During a Time of Pandemic: A World Anthology of Poems on COVID-19 (KTI, 2020), I Can't Breathe: A Poetic Anthology of Social Justice (KTI, 2021) and The Griots of Ubuntu: An Anthology of Contemporary Poetry from Africa (KTI, 2021). He is the author of ten folktales of the Abagusii people of Kenya, three children's storybooks, one play, one collection of short stories, two novels and four oral literature textbooks. Website: www.okemwa.co.ke Okemwa holds a Ph.D. Literature from Mo University. In addition, he has a Master's in Literature and a Bachelor of Education from the University of Nairobi, Kenya.
